FC2 doubtful quality?

[Jonathan Rawle]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>     to those folks who habitually respond to critisicm of FC 1/2 with this
> annoying, circle-the-wagons, defensive mentality, a piece of advice: grow
> up.

Some people on both side of the argument do take things all out of
proportion. 

Also, I do wish people would stop replying to messages telling people to
search the archive rather than answering questions. In the time you've
written than, you could in many cases answer the question, and you're
generating just as many messages to the groups with the negative reply. If
you don't want to answer, write nothing.

>>> - Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
>>> bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug,
>>> the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
>>
>> This seems to be system specific. My IBM Thinkpad T30's PCMCIA works
>> without any problems.
> 
>     well, good for you.  and the fact that it works for you means ...
>     what?

It's true, there are a few rough edges, but I'm delighted with FC2 and have
no hardware problems. Maybe on some hardware configurations there are
problems, but that's even the case with Windows XP.

For example, my webcam simply isn't supported under XP. My graphics card
causes the system to lock up (unless I use the latest drivers, in which
case the graphics simply aren't displayed properly). Also, I couldn't
figure out how to set a static IP address, so I had to wait until I could
look it up on Google at work, then try again the next evening...

So there are some problems with FC2 on some motherboards, but then some
systems simply wouldn't support XP when it came out. In the latter case,
people would think "XP won't support my computer, I'll have to upgrade".
With Linux at least there's another option, "FC2 won't support my computer,
I'll have submit a bug report / wait until someone fixes it / submit a
patch."

FC2 isn't perfect by any means, but for a freely-available, community
effort, we shouldn't be too harsh on it. And on some hardware
configurations (such as mine) FC2 is fantastic.

>>> - My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
>>> since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace
>>> this...
>>
>> You must load the pcspkr module. It's been discussed and is in the
>> archives.
> 
> which doesn't dismiss the original poster's contention that it's still a
> mildly-annoying bug, and one which didn't exist in FC1.  i don't think
> it's unreasonable for folks to gripe when things which once worked in FC1
> suddenly stopped working in FC2.
> 

Really? I thought the absence of a beep was a great new feature! It's
annoying to have a beep every time I use tab-completion in a console, and
it also means I don't have to hack my emacs config to stop it from beeping.

Maybe there could be a new system-config-beep utility to set whether the
pcspkr module is loaded at boot!


Jonathan