WARNING:DO NOT UPGRADE TO CORE 4

[Timothy Murphy]

Les Mikesell wrote:

>> Consider the possibility that an installation might not work on machine
>> X, but an upgrade might.
> 
> Then you've created a totally unique situation where the reason it works
> at all is likely because you have bits and pieces of some unrelated
> version still running.  That might work for you, but if you have
> problems no one else will understand them or be able to help.

How can one have "bits and pieces of some unrelated version still running"
if you do a clean install?

I'm not actually asking for your help,
I'm simply pointing out that your dogmatic assertion
that installation is always better than upgrade 
is not true, giving as a counter-example
the fact that I have a machine where the first did not work,
and the second did.

The reason for this - although this is not strictly relevant -
is that recent versions of Fedora run mkinitrd when installing their kernel.
This has to determine in some way which modules should be included in initrd
and in my case it includes the wrong scsi driver.
There are various ways in which I can counter-act this,
but the simple fact is that a clean install does not work -
it leaves a machine which will not boot.

 
>> Also consider the possibility that it might make more sense
>> to keep /home on a separate partition, and leave this alone even if
>> installing.
> 
> That's a reasonable approach, as is backing it up and restoring. You
> probably want the backup anyway in case you make a mistake involving
> the partitions.

It's not an either-or situation.
You implied that you deleted /home ,
and I'm pointing out that that was a silly thing to do.

> Historically, Linux kernels have solved most of their hardware issues
> somewhere around X.X.20.  If don't use anything unusual you might not
> notice this.  I see that firewire might be fixed in 2.6.12...

This seems to me complete nonsense.
There are many hardware issues for Linux remaining,
eg problems with RAID, graphics, 11g WiFi, many USB devices, etc, etc,
I suspect there always will be such problems,
as new hardware devices come out.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland