Linux examined: Fedora 9

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=E800C1E1-17A4-0F78-316FA48755E1A1AB



"For many of us, our first painful introduction to old-school Linux installs came from installing early versions of Red Hat . Like most early Linux installs, it was a highly technical, highly finicky process that was best left to the experts."


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Hi,

We have to review the complaints here and address them. If anyone wants
to take a closer look, please do.


http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=E800C1E1-17A4-0F78-316FA48755E1A1AB

"On the whole, Fedora is a solid Linux distribution that will probably
serve you well for desktop usage. Red Hat can rightly claim extensive
experience as a commercial Linux vendor; it practically invented the
market. Installing Fedora is a good way to ensure an extensive
repository of prebuilt software. The hardware support is right up there
with any other user-friendly distribution.


But my experiences with trying a multiboot install make me leery of
recommending it to anyone who wants to use it in a dual-boot
environment. The distribution may be robust, but the installer needs to
learn to play better with others. It's also a little too intimidating
for nongeek users, so if you're going to get any less-experienced
friends on Fedora, you might want to schedule an afternoon to help them
out."


Rahul

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On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 23:52 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We have to review the complaints here and address them. If anyone wants
> to take a closer look, please do.
>
> http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=E800C1E1-17A4-0F78-316FA48755E1A1AB
>
> "On the whole, Fedora is a solid Linux distribution that will probably
> serve you well for desktop usage. Red Hat can rightly claim extensive
> experience as a commercial Linux vendor; it practically invented the
> market. Installing Fedora is a good way to ensure an extensive
> repository of prebuilt software. The hardware support is right up there
> with any other user-friendly distribution.
>
> But my experiences with trying a multiboot install make me leery of
> recommending it to anyone who wants to use it in a dual-boot
> environment. The distribution may be robust, but the installer needs to
> learn to play better with others. It's also a little too intimidating
> for nongeek users, so if you're going to get any less-experienced
> friends on Fedora, you might want to schedule an afternoon to help them
> out."

I'm confused by the article's premise. The author claims to be testing
on the basis of whether a "newbie" could install Fedora, but he tests it
on a system that is completely unrelated to that use case -- a
previously multi-boot system with what sounds like several existing (or
previously existing) Linux distributions.

Some of the errors he encounters are certainly bugs, and I've already
seen some of these reported in other places. An example is the Anaconda
error loop, which the author reports but did not file, although he filed
another bug, so bravo there.

I think something our QA folks (Will et al.) should think about is a way
to expose more details about the test configurations they use for
banging on the installer. These could be exposed to the media for our
Alpha or Beta test release, as well as our larger user base, to make
sure that people are expanding on those configurations, rather than
duplicating them endlessly to the exclusion of others.

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2008/5/15 Paul W. Frields <stickster@gmail.com>:

> I think something our QA folks (Will et al.) should think about is a way
> to expose more details about the test configurations they use for
> banging on the installer. These could be exposed to the media for our
> Alpha or Beta test release, as well as our larger user base, to make
> sure that people are expanding on those configurations, rather than
> duplicating them endlessly to the exclusion of others.

Our test matrix is available here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/TestResults/Fedora9Install/FinalRelease

Admittedly, we need A LOT more detail on the tested hardware in these,
but these are the high-level test cases that we use. Note the absence
of dual-boot systems in there - that very probably is a gap in our
test coverage, but all of these are manual test cases, since we
currently have no viable automated test harness, and every one of
these tests take time. A dual-boot test would take even more time
(which is, unfortunately, a finite resource) A lot of testing is also
done in KVM/QEMU/VMWare (yes, that's me using proprietary software,
but given our usage profile, I think that it's essential test
coverage), and not on real hardware. I know that one of the proposals
that we were floating in the QA team was requiring smolt profiles for
each test case, so that we could tell how it was tested and that the
test succeeded. We'll probably be talking more about this internally
in QA in the future, no decision has yet been made to my knowledge
(but I think it's an excellent idea).

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We have here 2 bugs who is not been seen as a
advantage for Fedora. Some users are angry, and Ubuntu
users love these problems to show that our distro has
bugs in the release too. The first one is 3 versions
old (yes, Fedora 6 problem):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=221336

Second, this is not a bug, is a decision made and
users who has Synaptic Touchpad are angry with that:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439386

Questions, this problems should be fixed, but when?

Cheers,

Rodrigo Menezes


--- "Paul W. Frields" <stickster@gmail.com> escreveu:

> On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 23:52 +0530, Rahul Sundaram
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > We have to review the complaints here and address
> them. If anyone wants
> > to take a closer look, please do.
> >
> >
>
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=E800C1E1-17A4-0F78-316FA48755E1A1AB
> >
> > "On the whole, Fedora is a solid Linux
> distribution that will probably
> > serve you well for desktop usage. Red Hat can
> rightly claim extensive
> > experience as a commercial Linux vendor; it
> practically invented the
> > market. Installing Fedora is a good way to ensure
> an extensive
> > repository of prebuilt software. The hardware
> support is right up there
> > with any other user-friendly distribution.
> >
> > But my experiences with trying a multiboot install
> make me leery of
> > recommending it to anyone who wants to use it in a
> dual-boot
> > environment. The distribution may be robust, but
> the installer needs to
> > learn to play better with others. It's also a
> little too intimidating
> > for nongeek users, so if you're going to get any
> less-experienced
> > friends on Fedora, you might want to schedule an
> afternoon to help them
> > out."
>
> I'm confused by the article's premise. The author
> claims to be testing
> on the basis of whether a "newbie" could install
> Fedora, but he tests it
> on a system that is completely unrelated to that use
> case -- a
> previously multi-boot system with what sounds like
> several existing (or
> previously existing) Linux distributions.
>
> Some of the errors he encounters are certainly bugs,
> and I've already
> seen some of these reported in other places. An
> example is the Anaconda
> error loop, which the author reports but did not
> file, although he filed
> another bug, so bravo there.
>
> I think something our QA folks (Will et al.) should
> think about is a way
> to expose more details about the test configurations
> they use for
> banging on the installer. These could be exposed to
> the media for our
> Alpha or Beta test release, as well as our larger
> user base, to make
> sure that people are expanding on those
> configurations, rather than
> duplicating them endlessly to the exclusion of
> others.
>
> --
> Paul W. Frields
> http://paul.frields.org/
> gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906
> ACDB C937 BD11 3717
> http://redhat.com/ - - - -
> http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
> irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs,
> #fedora-devel, #fredlug
> > --
> Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
> Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com
>
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Rodrigo Menezes wrote:

We have here 2 bugs who is not been seen as a
advantage for Fedora. Some users are angry, and Ubuntu
users love these problems to show that our distro has
bugs in the release too. The first one is 3 versions
old (yes, Fedora 6 problem):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=221336

Second, this is not a bug, is a decision made and
users who has Synaptic Touchpad are angry with that:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439386

Questions, this problems should be fixed, but when?


Post to fedora-devel list about this. That's a much better list for such
discussions. Also other distributions aren't really in a state to be
throwing stones right now. I could point out their bug trackers too but
that would be scooping down way too low.


Rahul

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