[Fedora] Re: FC-4 -- unhappy experiences

[Timothy Murphy]

Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:

> Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
>>The fact that something works on your computer
>>but does not work on mine
>>does not say anything about your moral character, or mine.
>>  
>>
>     I don't think his e-mail had anything to do with moral character
> what so ever.  Everyone has different hardware, and the Fedora
> developers can't possibly account for every single piece of hardware
> people *MIGHT* be using on any particular system.  What seems "routine"
> for some, might not be, and in many cases will not be, routine for you.
> What works for you, might not work for me.  This has nothing to do with
> someone's moral character.

I was responding to the person who said
================================================
2. Myself and many other people, who always
backup/format/install/restore, have no issues. If anything, the
installer is getting better all the time.
================================================

The clear implication of this seemed to me to be
that he was a person of superior intellect
who didn't have problems installing Fedora
like lesser minds like me.

As I have pointed out several times -
possibly such reasoning does not reach his giddy heights -
it would have been a complete waste of time following his advice
as I am running FC-4 on this SCSI machine (upgraded from FC-3)
and the kernel distributed with FC-4 does not work on this machine.
(There is a panic when it does not find the hard disk.)
Therefore if I had followed his advice 
I would now have an unworkable machine.

I like Fedora, but in my experience it is greatly inferior
to other distributions _at the point of installation_.
This is not the only or even the main matter
when judging between distributions.
Eg SuSE is better at installing on different machines
than Fedora, but there are other aspects of SuSE
which lead me to prefer Fedora.
Knoppix is by far the best at booting, in my experience,
and I would advise anyone having problems installing Fedora
to see if the Knoppix CD will boot on their machine,
as if it does then they will probably succeed in installing Fedora
sooner or later.

I'm sorry, but I remain of the opinion
than anaconda not only has serious deficiencies,
but does not have in place proper mechanisms for dealing with them.



-- 
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