Fedora Core 6 HUGE problem - Binary drivers.

[Arthur Pemberton]

On 5/29/07, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>
>   >> Users lose either of these ways.  The first question is why does
> anyone
> >> who has a working kernel and device drivers _ever_ need to install a
> >> behavior-changing replacement - and particularly within an FCx release
> >
> > When they want a feature in the new kernel. Features I am personally looking
> > forward to is the removal of the limit of arguments to exec and dmcrypt
> > getting write barrier support back.
> >
> >> where the next one is only months away? If there is an answer to that
> >
> > Your assuming that there will be an nVidia driver for the next Fedora release.
> > That isn't necessary going to be the case.
>
> But that's not a big problem until updates stop for the current release.
>    You can put off installing a new release as long as necessary.  A
> kernel update within a release that breaks needed drivers is a big problem.

But, you're ignoring the part that the entity doing the kernel upgrade
and the entity working on the driver are two separate and independent
entities. Seriously, you don't give Nvidia's devs enough credit, if
their higher ups cared, their drivers would always work.

>
> > I think trying to make Fedora for everyone is a mistake. It's current missions
> > of using all free software (now including build tools, making it almost a
> > source based distro) and keeping up with very recent versions of software
> > included fits what I want very well. It isn't a no headache system though.
> > For people admining their own system that want something that just works,
> > Ubuntu seems to be the system of choice these days.
>
> Don't forget fedora's 'other' purpose of evolving to near-verbatim RHEL
> releases - which then has the problem of frozen application versions for
> the long, long term between those releases.  I agree that the current
> fedora disto acting as a fast-changing testbed is a necessary evil, but
> I wish there were something that used the same packaging and admin
> techniques that would make a usable desktop - like an FCx release
> usually becomes for a short period near the end of its life.

What are you talking about? My Fedora desktop was always usable.

-- 
Fedora Core 6 and proud