FC2 working fine (Re:)

[David Jansen]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 09:56:29AM +0100, Stephan Matthiesen wrote:
> I just mention this because mailing lists tend to give a very selective, 
> biased picture. Lots of people with lots of problems, but all the millions of 
> users who are happy have no reason to post to the list, so they are 
> invisible. So I think when you are planning an upgrade, it would be good to 
> look at the complete picture, and this seems to me that the likelihood of 
> something seriously going wrong is very small.

So true. And some others, including myself, have run into problems that
could be solved to read the FAQ and search the list archives, and maybe
ask a couple of questions. 

So far I have installed FC2 on 12 machines and helped a couple of friends 
and collegues to install it on their machines. My statistics so far:
- 9x hit by the Windows dual boot issue, but easily solvable without loss
  of data, thanks to the info on this list (it's not entirely fair,
  those 9 systems are identical configurations, so this is actually just
  one data point in the bug statistics)
- 1 machine failed to boot. Asus-board issue, solved by downloading the 
  updated boot.iso
Everything else just worked. So yes, it is somewhat more problematic
than FC1 (but in many respects still better than some previous RHL
versions).

Bugs are to be expected in any OS. And bugs are getting fixed, usually
at a reasonable pace. Now, what can we do to make Fedora Core even
better for users?

1. A real community
Let's hope the point will soon be reached where there is the public CVS
repository, the ability for members of the community to become
maintainers of packages, the 'real" Fedora Extras and Fedora Alternatives
repositories etc. That would be a great step forward (but apparently
somewhat difficult from redHat's end)

2. Documentation and information, and letting the users know about it.
It would be great if the release notes or the Fedora website would
mention the unofficial resources available to the users, like
fedoranews.org, fedora forum, the unofficial Fedora FAQ, additional
software repositories etc. 
Not everyone likes mailinglists, but it seems the only way to find out
about e.g. fedoranews is to read on the website or release notes about
the mailinglist, then subscribe or search the archive and wade through
the enourmous amount of mail (which is a great reasource, but it is a lot
to search through!) and then finally find out such a site exists. 

3. A policy about updates. 
Why isn't the updated boot.iso for the ASUS boards available from the
official locations? That would make it easier to find, and available on
the mirrors. Seems to me like a much better solution than downloading it
from ArjanV's personal site. An announcement of such an update would
also be useful, on fedora-announce, and on the Fedora website. That
would probably have saved us a lot of questions on the list.
I fear the same will happen if an universal solution to the dual-boot 
problems will be found, since this will probably require an update of
the anaconda installer or disk druid, so that's probably an updated boot
disk. Will we have to create one ourselves or wait for FC3, or will such
an update be officially published? Bugs in the installer will happen
again, just like bugs in any piece of software. So a mechanism to fix
them is necessary. It used to be possible to just wait for a fix in the
next release, but with the shorter lifetime of the FC versions, this is
not always an option any more.
I would find it somewhat acceptable if the Fedora project had an
official policy not to release installer updates but only package
updates. I wouldn't like such a policy, but at least then the situation
would be clear. 


Note: most of this was not relevant to me, I have used RedHat since 3.x
and I knew about fedora.us int he RedHat 8 or 9 days, and I started
using FC 1 at test 2 last autumn. But I'm thinking here from the
perspective of a new user, who may or may not know about Linux already,
and who may or may not be aware in advance of the goals of the fedora
project. 

David Jansen