[TriLUG] Fw: WinXP vs RH 7.2

[Brent Fox]

On Thursday 01 November 2001 01:26 pm, Marc Johnson wrote:
> > > As for his woes installing RH7.2 ... been there, done that. I've had no
> > >end
> > > of crappy installs just like what he describes - frozen systems, CDs
> >that
> > > won't boot, installations that dump core, you name it. Currently I'm in
> > > love with my Mandrake 8.0 system. Why? Because it was an install that
> > > worked the first time I tried it. Thought I'd died and gone to heaven.
> >
> >Wait a minute...you said earlier that you hadn't tried 7.2...
>
> True; but I've experienced similar problems with other distributions
> though. This is just more of the same. I've given up on Red Hat because of
> these kinds of problems. This is not a new "feature".
>

If you are seeing cd's the won't boot, you are not even getting to the 
installer.  If the cd's aren't readable, then there's no hope of a good 
install.  It's not Red Hat's fault if the user downloads an ISO that gets 
corrupted, or if their CD burner burns a bad disc.  If you get a bad retail 
cd, then there was a problem at the production house...take it back and swap 
it for a new one.

Did you enter a bug in Bugzilla for any of these failed installs?  Otherwise, 
we don't know about it.  If we don't know about it, we can't fix it.  We are 
not all-knowing, all-seeing.

> It works on some systems, not on the columnist's. And, as the followup
> article points out, he's not running some obscure off-the-wall
> configuration, it's an off-the-shelf Dell system. I recall that in the
> original article he discovered that there were some known problems ... and
> my response is: then FIX them. If you know your software can't work with
> certain hardware configurations, either work around the problem, or come up
> with a more elegant and friendly solution than locking up or dumping core.
>

This is my complaint...he doesn't give a URL or anything to back up his 
claims.  

Here's an excerpt from the article:

-------------------------------------------------
First off, I couldn't get the installation CD to run. I re-booted about 
eight times, but it just spun up and died, and went to the next boot device. 
On the Red Hat support site I found an article explaining that when a CD-ROM 
is connected to an IDE controller (just like mine), the program has 
'problems'. 
--------------------------------------------------

Can someone please show me where on the Red Hat site it says that 7.2 has 
problems with IDE cdrom drives?  Look, I see *every single bug* that comes in 
for anaconda, and the "problem" with IDE cdrom drives with 7.2 he is 
referring to just doesn't exist.  He is either confused about what version he 
is talking about or he is just making things up.

There was a problem with 7.1 in that the boot kernel enabled DMA transfers by 
default.  This caused problems with *some* cdrom drives that couldn't do DMA, 
but instead of falling back to non-DMA mode, they just behaved strangely 
(usually I/O errors).  Booting the installer with 'linux ide=nodma' solved 
the problem.  With 7.2, the kernel team disabled DMA in the boot kernel to 
avoid the problem.  Problem found, problem fixed.


> >If the problems you are talking about are related to faulty hardware, how
> >would you propose to fix the problem via software?
>
> If the defective hardware can be detected, then do so, and either work
> around the defect, or report, in clear language, exactly what the problem
> is.
>

Look, I've talked to the guy.  I know what kind of machine he's running on.  
Except for the nVidia card, it is almost identical to my machine at work.  
Dell is one of our biggest corporate partners.  We have labs full of Dell 
machines.  We test the hell out of Dell's hardware, so the people that say 
that Red Hat Linux doesn't work on Dell boxes don't know what they are 
talking about.

I offered to help the guy debug the problem.  I asked him what he saw on VC4 
when the installer crashed.  This is what he said:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 03:06:46 -0500
From: "Thomas C. Greene" <tcgreene at bellatlantic.net>
Subject: RE: Win-XP vs Red Hat 7.2
To: "Brent Fox" <bfox at redhat.com>
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)


OK, i did an automatic 'installer' format and chose kde and grub.

this time the screen went to like a black DOS screen, (this has happened b4
with RH 7.2, though sometimes the GUI screen remains and the system just
freezes).

many lines like:
RPMDB: write failed for page (number)

install exited abnormally
you may safely reboot your system.

i hit alt+ctrl+F4 and missed much of what was displayed.  one screen's worth
looked like this:

I/O error dev 03:42 (hdb) sector (number)

error -3 while decompressing!

t.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


hdb is his cdrom drive, and the kernel is finding bad sectors on it.  This is 
either a bad cd or a bad drive.  He swapped the cd and then saw other 
"problems", which he neglected to describe.  I asked him if he would open a 
report in Bugzilla, but he wasn't interested.


> When Red Hat, or any other vendor rolls out a distribution with similar
> vulnerabilities in its installer, that is inexcusable IMNSHO. If you know
> of a 'gotcha' that can f*ck up the installation, and you just let it slide,
> that makes the user wonder what the quality of the rest of the software is
> like.

You have obviously never met Glen Foster, head of Red Hat QA.  This guy 
doesn't let stuff slide.  Seriously.  I'm not saying we put out completely 
perfect software (I don't think any company does), but we do not knowingly 
ship software with those kinds of defects.  A modern Linux distribution is 
something like 10 million lines of code, most of which the distributions 
themselves didn't write.  So yes, it's a complicated collection of software 
and things may not always be perfect.

But Linux has never been perfect.  Shoot, Linus has released "stable" 
versions of the kernel that were anything but stable.  Does that mean that no 
one should use Linux?  Of course not.  People work hard and they do their 
best...what more can anyone expect?  If you find a problem, send it to 
Bugzilla (or whatever bug tracker your distro uses) so that the problem can 
be fixed.  Complain to the people that can actually fix the problem.  Now if 
they blow you off and refuse to fix the problem, then that's another story.

At least with Linux you have the ability (if you have the know-how) to fix 
the problems you might encounter.  This is the strength of OSS.  As for your 
problems with Borland, you're out of luck because they won't let you see how 
things work.  Now that really sucks.


Just my opinion,
   Brent