F8 kernel-2.6.24.3-12.fc8

[Callum Lerwick]

On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 17:41 -0400, David Boles wrote:
> I don't think that "Aunt Tillie" should be using a bleeding edge Linux
> distribution such as Fedora provides. And if "Nephew Johnie" installs
> it
> for her and she has problems with it that she can not deal with
> herself I
> think it is "Nephew Johny's" fault for installing it for her. What do
> you
> think?

I think you missed the point that this is just as painful for Joe Fedora
Developer and CS Major as it is Aunt Tillie.

User friendly for Aunt Tillie, if done properly, translates to quick and
painless for me. Bip, done, and I can get on with my life. Yes, I am
able to type arcane command lines and edit obscure config files. That
doesn't mean I want to. My first Linux was Slackware 3.2 in 1997. I
spent a week just trying to get PPP to work. Took months to get XFree86
to work. I've had enough of doing it the hard way for one lifetime,
thank you. This is the exact reason I *use* Fedora, instead of Slackware
or Gentoo or even Debian. Because it does the best job of Just Working
out of every distribution I've ever tried. But it could be better.

There's two issues here:

1) Preventing bugs.

2) Recovering from bugs.

The first one gets plenty of coverage. Everyone's trying to fix bugs.
But bugs are inevitable. So when a serious kernel regression shows up,
how do you recover from it? If you ask me, very little thought is being
put in to making system recovery user friendly.

It's easy to say "Just boot the previous kernel!", it's much harder to
actually do it. And make it stick. Each new kernel insists on making
itself default. And yes, I've tried setting UPDATEDEFAULT=no
in /etc/sysconfig/kernel, it doesn't seem to work reliably, and it's
definitely not user friendly, and it's not easy to change the default
kernel back once's its been changed. (Now you have to
edit /boot/grub/grub.conf...) I know what you're going to say, just
remove the broken kernel. But then, the next time you update, it just
gets installed again.

Direct manipulation. I, and Aunt Tillie, should be able to set the
default kernel right there in the GRUB menu, with one keypress. Click,
done, move on to something more productive. Such as filing a bug...

Even better, work out a way to detect a failed kernel boot and
automagically drop back to the last known working kernel. I seem to
remember a thread about this a while back. This would work for total
boot failures, but wouldn't really help driver regressions.
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