[100119] in RedHat Linux List
RE: I'm dissapointed in 5.2
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rich Minear)
Wed Nov 18 15:26:25 1998
From: Rich Minear <RMinear@amctheatres.com>
To: "'redhat-list@redhat.com'" <redhat-list@redhat.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 14:24:23 -0600
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
We have loaded 5.2 on several machines, (including a Dell Laptop with
PCMCIA support), and have not had any problems.
The install went fine, and we were up and running in less than 1/2 hour
on each box.
I use linuxconf to configure PPP on my machine at home, and it is
working fine also.
Rich Minear
Sr. Network Admin
AMC Theatres
rminear@amctheatres.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Forrester [mailto:rickf@glacier.jpl.nasa.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 1998 1:55 PM
To: roberts@tsasa.lanl.gov
Cc: The recipient's address is unknown.; The recipient's address is
unknown.
Subject: Re: I'm dissapointed in 5.2
Respectfully, Doug, I must strongly disagree on several points. Your
"bugs" are, I fear, largely perceptual & relate to a lack of adequate
knowledge and expectations that are unfounded.
The first expectation I'll mention is support. It is well documented
in the users guide, on the web site, elsewhere, and has been a topic
of considerable discussion on the mailing list that the free support
which is included is limited to getting a basic, working installation.
It is economically impossible to provide free support beyond that basis.
When you take a working system and start building custom kernels, you
have gone beyond the free support point. There is paid support avail-
able, or you have this and other lists as a resource.
roberts@tsasa.lanl.gov said:
> I'm a long-time Linux user: I've been running Linux boxes for the
> past 5 years (and other Un*x boxes for the last 12 years). I recently
> installed 5.2 on my Gateway 2000 9100XL to test 5.2, even though I
> already had a perfectly good Slakware 3.5 distribution running on the
> machine. The reason that I decided to try RedHat was that I was under
> the (apparently false) impression that RH had the best-supported,
> most feature-rich, easiest-to-install, most bug-free distribution of
> any of them (Debian, XSuSe, Slakware, Caldera).
> After 5 days of encountering bugs in 5.2, I convinced that this
> distribution was released way prematurely. Here's a short list of
> RedHat things that don't work as they should:
> 1. PCMCIA. It worked fine with the default 2.0.36-0.7 kernel.
> However, the default kernel does not have apm (advanced power
> management) built into it. No problem, I'll just build a kernel with
> apm. Fine: apm now works, but pcmcia card_services are broken. So I
> built a fresh pcmcia for the pcmcia-cs-3.0.5 source. Still no go. To
> get pcmcia to work, I had to roll back to kernel version 2.0.35. This
> problem was reported to RedHat as [ticket #50441] PCMCIA/RH 5.2
> problem.
Regretably I've been rather swamped & skipped by (and deleted) some
messages, so I don't have any listing of what you may have reported in
your effort to resolve the problem. Did you check /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia
for correct values? Did you compile pcmcia_cs as a module? Did you
check to see that it had been loaded? Did you investigate the contents
of /var/log/messages? Did you review the PCMCIA-HOWTO? There's some
help in there, though a few details have been changed.
> 2. RedHat Support. I reported this problem to them, and was told that
> they couldn't help me.
Addressed above.
> 3. Linuxconf. The network -> PPP -> Communication portion does not
> work. According to the documentation you can test the set-up by
> clicking on the "connect" button to see if the modem dials. It's
> broken, nothing happens.
> Linuxconf. Activating the ppp0 interface via the network portion
> of Linuxconf changes the mode of whatever cua /dev/modem is linked to
> to root only read/write permissions, even if you have specfied via
> linuxconf that any user is allowed to (de)activate the ppp0 interface.
Can't address this point; haven't worked with linuxconf on this point
and there are no other postings of problems in the mail list archives
at this time. My suggestion would be to go to the linuxconf home site
and email the developer from there, or post your problems on the
linuxconf mail list for help in resolving.
> 4. PPP. After configuring pppd with proper settings for netmask, mru,
> crtscts, defaultroute, modem, and detach, the ppp0 interface was
> extremely slow to to numerous dropped RX packets. This could be due
> to the pcmcia problems described above.
This could be. Best to resolve the known issue, or, as a test, revert
to the distro kernel, modules, and configuration, and then retest.
> 5. Numerous other little irritating facets of the installation and
> configuration interfaces that don't quite work right.
Such as? Nebulous reports of "little irritating facets" arn't subject
to verifcation and/or modification
> I find it very disappointing that RedHat would release what I
> consider to be a sub-standard distribution. I am a big proponent of
> Linux, and I feel that the success of Linux over Microsoft will hinge
> on quality distributions which make the installation and and
> maintenance of Linux easy and trouble free. As it is, I am going to
> go back the Slakware 3.5 because it is solid. It might not have the
> "User Friendly" gui-based installation and system maintenance
> "features", but it works.
This whole last section smacks of "I'm going to take my ball & go
home." I doubt that was your intention; but you seem irritated but
unwilling to provide specifics.
> RedHat: I'm afraid you have done damage to the Linux community with
> this release. New Linux users are going to try RedHat 5.2, become
> frustrated, and give up. The fact that you were not even able to
> provide support for the pcmcia problem that I reported indicates that
> you are either in way over your head, or lack the proper business
> sense to provide the level of service required for your product.
> --Doug
You're entitled to your opinion. But a lot of this seems to be pique
at not getting exactly what you expected - when what you expected is
at odds with clearly posted information, in particular, the support
issue.
--
Rick Forrister <Richard.Forrister@jpl.nasa.gov>
You'll wonder why your data's lost
When you load your system with MicroSoft...
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