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Red Hat Linux 7 Infested With Bugs
TBHiX writes "Apparently, according to reports on bugzilla and on linuxnewbie.internet.com, Red Hat 7.0 is being described by some people as one of the buggiest distros they've seen in recent history." Red Hat's point-oh releases have been historically been pretty bad over the years, so I the only thing that surprises me is that people didn't realize it before they downloaded it. The point release has typically been fine, but the bugzilla report lists over a thousand bugs: 200 appearing this week.
Take this as a warning folks: didn't 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 teach you anything? *grin* But a DB with 2500 bugs in it doesn't necessarily mean a buggy distribution either.
Number one: *.0 releases from RedHat are always buggy - deal!
I've run 4.2 on my servers and just patched the security stuff via the errata - #1 if it ain't broke don't fix it. 4.2 is rock solid. Uptimes w/ htpd, nntpd and a private ftp server on a lowly pent 90 w/ 64 megs and this baby just sits there and DOES ITS JOB!
I run 4.1 RedHat at home an dsee no reason to upgrade - call me old and non-bleeding edge, I don't care.
I haven't even LOOKED at a RedHat distro since 4.2, so I'm totally out of it re: what's the big deal - I still run Sun OS 4.1.4 on a production web server and it just sits there and runs (patches addedfor security and such.
WTF is the big deal? I run NT 4.0 at work, server and workstation, Win2kpro at home w/ cable modem, support win98 desktops at work...............
So, RedHat 7.0 comes out w/ mucho bugs........
So what. RH always posts errata which are easy as shit to install
RH doesn't hide the problems
RH releases stuff on the bleeding edge and lets the "community" look at the distro and code.
If you don'tneed to upgrade, don't and deal.
If you want to upgrade, do so and deal......
If you get disgusted at RH for the distro, you've got shitloads of others to choose fron - just check LWN...deal
This is getting too long. So, I'm gonna have another beer and watch Ms. Sommers and her newest ab developer and wait for 7.2
P.S. pardon my spelling - I'm wasted, not brain-challenged!
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
The only service pack issued has been to address compatibility concerns with older apps never meant to be run in Windows 2000.
Umm... No. The list of bugs fixed in Service Pack 1 is here, continued here, and finished off here. That's more than one bug, and more than just compatability with old apps.
Wow, linux supports USB now? That's great! I've been using FreeBSD because it supports USB and seems more stable than linux, but I guess it's time to make the switch. One down, one to go.
My Win2k box has not crashed once in the three months I've had it, and I typically leave it on for many weeks at a time without rebooting. Same goes for the Debian (Woody) Linux box. RH typically dies on me as I type my password (I'm not kidding!), but I think that was some sort of hardware problem. It seems 7.0b, as well as 6.1 and 6.2, did not like my GeForce 2 for some reason.
------
The fact is that RedHat is easier to install and easier to administer than Debian for the average user.
Debian is hard to install.
But its administration is tops among linuxes. It is built almost entirely by volunteer system administrators. It is the only linux trivial to upgrade from one distribution to the next.
With all this talk about Red Hat 7.0, what do people think about Suse 7.0?
Okay, let's compare apples to apples. First you can READ the article about the W2k bug, then you can READ the bugzilla list, and get back to me on which of those bugs count as "core operating system" bugs. Of course, you may not know what an "active directory" is, or if it's part of the "core operating system", as you say, but I'd be interested to know what you think.
/. borked their facts on this one, and most of the bugs don't sound all that bad as far as I'm concerned, but really, what's your point?
Granted,
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
slashdot 7.0
then mandrake 7.0
then SuSE 7.0
think maybe red hat was just a bit rushed to get theirs out there. and yet --- debian is only on 2.2 and running smooth. Something to Ponder.
"I mean, All you can definately say about a fellow who thinks he's a poached egg, is; He's in the minority." James Burke
Yes, that original post wasn't put there to inflame someone at Red Hat, and they should just take shit with a smile! Come on, anyone who approaches any support person with a close that threatens to go to another distro is just excessive, reminds me of all the point-and-clickers who whine that they will stop using Linux if they don't make it more like Windows.
To fail is human, to blue screen MS!
Yeah, becuase they never promote Debian around here...
8-p
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
sigh. just for fun, though i know people will dismiss this thought anyway.. id just like to remind everyone of when windows 2000 was released. (note: i prefer OpenBSD) And it had bugs. it was just further proof of how MS was was this big stupid horrible company with a crappy product. That is, of course, paraphrasing alot, but it sums up the general /. thought on the matter. Now redhat is loaded with bugs and "its to be expected as it grows"! rubbish. If MS cant make mistakes, why dont you bash redhat too? because linux users are too damn cool. whatever.
Show me your karma first. How am I to know whether you're a true alpha male?
-- Anne Marie
Place yer bets now on the arrival date of 7.1!
Isn't that called install notes and a knowledge base? ;>
Off...the best bug spray in the world...just one quick coat, and the bugs don't come back...or a good flyswatter.
The anti-salmon
Bugs per line of code (LOC).
See Emphasizing Software Test Process Improvement... in it, they say:
So, If Windows 2000 was 30 million LOC, you can expect there to be, on average, between 120,000 and 180,000 bugs in the shipping code.
Let's be generous to MS, and say that they have an outstanding development process as decribed in the above paper. Because of this, they manage to reduce the number of bugs by a factor of 50%; so they're only shipping with 60,000 - 90,000 bugs.
Now, let's be even more generous, and assume that only 10% of the bugs actually present in a system is actually ever noticed and reported (BTW, a ridiculously low estimate, IMHO...) This means that W2K should have on the order of 6,000 to 9,000 reported bugs.
Now, contrast that with the latest Red Hat release; buggy as all git out, you know. 2000 reported bugs. You'd have to go back and compare LOC to get a comparable estimate, but I'm guessing that if you count all the various and sundry packages, Red Hat ships at least 30 million LOC in a distro... which would mean that their code, buggy as all sin and scorned by open source hackers everywhere, would contain about one-third of the bugs that W2K contains.
That's why you're buying Linux.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
hey hey, after this story was posted on slashdot the all ftp servers have mysteriously cleared up. I think CmdrTaco is a secretly a RH user and he just wanted to be able to download it :-)
And you all cry foul and bitch/complain when Win2k has some bugs.
/. pimp "thousands of bugs in RH" once a day for the next week like win2k. Jeez.. damn hypocrites.
Yes, RH 7.0 is worse than win2k bugwise and come to think of it RH is free! What gives?
I know that everything is not perfect but just to give linux a hard time why don't
Either way, I still love linux but damn.. dont be TOO one sided!
When death looks you in the eye, smile. Someone needs to cheer him up.
Overrated: Sensationalist Trash
Overrated: Devoid of Research
Overrated: Doesn't Matter
Overrated: *YAWN*
This does not go to say that some won't be fooled. After all, there is always at least one and usually at least two people responsible for the articles (and the oh so stimulating and well thought out comments attached). Which leaves us with a moderation like this:
Underrated: If Chewbacca Lived On Endor, You Must Love Slashdot
So, is this another example of considering a product update/release 'beta' after its release, a la Quake3 v1.25? :)
(Graeme et al can claim "it really was a beta" all they want.. but with no mention of it in the readme? c'mon...)
-'fester
It will be increasingly more difficult to manage the distribution configuration as it's size grows. Anyone who works in software development knows this. This is not suprising.
But damn, it's been a week and all the mirrors are still swamped with people downloading it. Unbeleivable. Now im trying to get extra packages that I forgot to specify and I'm having a hard time finding a decent ftp site. It's terrible.
I guess redhat learned their lesson, after my install, all services (telnet, ftp, ssh, etc.) were dissabled by default.
Word to the wise: Don't upgrade if you want stability. However, for desktop users, you probably won't regret it.
(Yes, I know I should be using something other than RH on my desktop. It's just what I have used for quite a while, and I'm used to it.)
Has gotten the redhat network to work?
Now redhat is loaded with bugs and "its to be expected as it grows"! rubbish.
Except, of course, that it isn't. You'd have known that, if you'd been paying attention.
If MS cant make mistakes, why dont you bash
redhat too?
Because there's nothing to bash RH about in this instance? How inconvenient!
because linux users are too damncool. whatever.
Gad. It'a wonder you manage to post anything at all, drowning as you must be in ennui.
-- Post No Gravy
I spent 3 days tracking down Red Hat 7.0, got 3 of the discs and I'm so happy my professors gave assignments that requred me to use Linux, otherwise Mandrake would have been gone and Red Hat 7 would be installed. Could have been worse, I could have installed it and found all 2500 bugs in an hour.
More like the poster must've been on something to mistake the 250 bugs listed in bugzilla for 2500.......
perhaps they forgot to limit the query, and got results for every redhat product ever released?
This story is extreme sensationalism...and very close to an outright lie.
Advanced users are users too!
Tried to compile a 2.2.17 kernel to get rid of a lot of the crap that comes by default with RH that I just don't want.
With all kinds of wacky warnings and errors, that
failed.
No biggie, figuring something was just wacky, I
went back to 2.2.16 that had been working
so well for me in RH6.2.
That will compile, but when I do "make modules",
there is some other wacky "pasting
token" errors, and it fails.
Read the release notes - that's what they're for!
A trivial hack of the kernel Makefile to select kgcc and you're right.
-- Post No Gravy
You mean PAY for software???
Are you nuts?? Or are you so rich that you can afford throwing money away?
No sig for the moment.
Close enough to Redhat, recompiled for the Pentium chip. Once I replaced RedHat with this beauty, I never bothered to look back.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
"his" and "he" are also used in the case when the gender of an individual is unknown. Many people insist on using "her" and "she" instead, which is also perfectly fine, since it doesn't really matter much in this case, now does it?
Think about that before you get all upset about correct grammer(in lieu of an obviously inflammatory saying that would fit this situation) - either way.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
Redhat is proud to announce the availability of Redhat 7.0, dubbed the 'Firestone ATX' release.
Lets see. shipping non-stable beta libc and gcc that won't even compile the kernel (or much else).
I agree with bug ID 18033; recalling redhat 7.0 might be a good idea although I suppose it's late for that. I hope redhat can make this mistake up to its customers; up untill now I've been satisfied with their products.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
I'm running 7.0/2.4.0-0.26/xFree86-4.01 on my laptop (my primary box) with no troubles. Even the PCMCIA card (which Win98 and 2k Pro both refused to recognize no matter what) works just fine. There may be a ton of bugs in it, but I haven't found any yet. 'Course, I'm just a new media/web application developer so maybe I don't push it hard enough ;)
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Of course, an older gcc is provided as 'kgcc' so that you can compile your kernels.
Without actually tweaking the Makefiles to deal with it. I know that 2.2.18 fixes this, but...
I finally got the time to build a new server for the house about the time that RH7 hit.
Now, leaving aside that adding an additional IDE controller is ungodly painful (hedrick's patches won't apply cleanly to the sources in the distro, and exactly what kernel options should I pass to probe a PnP PCI card?), I couldn't get the new kernel to build. Now I've built a few kernels, so I tried a few things.
Maybe the patches hosed me...reinstall the source RPM....nope.
OK, so I've selected some impossible combination of options... make mrproper ; make dep ; make clean ; make bzImage and just lean on CR through the config, accepting all the defaults...nope.
That's when I gave up for the night. I didn't figure out the the kgcc thing until I followed this story's link into bugzilla.
I know, I know...RTFREADME, but I think I'd make sure that kernels would build "out of the box" before I released a major upgrade to a major distro.
-Zandr
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
With as large of a user base as RedHat has (and increasing), there are bound to be hundreds of horrible stories. But for each horror story, how many more success stories go on that are untold?
Just because the number of bug reports goes up doesn't mean that quality of product has gone down. If a product gets 1 bug report and has 1 user, does that show its quality? No.
But with the RH7.0 release, how many hundreds of thousands tried the product? And we're looking at maybe 255 bugs? Probably less than 50 of which are genuine bugs.
It's easy to hear those who are having problems because they shout the loudest. It's the people who it works for that aren't heard. All the success stories are silent. I'm one of the success stories. I've installed RH7.0 on 4 servers now. (one 486, a P133, one P-3 850, and a big phat $15k dual zeon 550). My installs have been flawless; better than any distro previous (including 6.2). If everyone shouted their successes as loudly as the minority shouts their failures, then RedHat would be overwhelmed with positives (and deaf).
I give a standing ovation for the RH 7.0 release.
Daniel
Actually a *lot* of the 65K bug were just theoretical bugs - not something anybody had/(probably)has hit. Just something that when the planets are lined up in correct fashion you have a chance of hitting...
Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second F for this term. - Prof. A.S. Tanenbaum, author of Minix,
that's what redhat gets for hiring away the mandrake distro bleeding-edgers
Slackware. One of the nicer (although it may seem a bit more spartan at first) distros out there. Get an ISO from someone and give it a weekend. If you're not convinced by a weekend of slack then I reccomend maybe trying Suse or maybe even one of the BSD's (which aren't bad either, I happen to enjoy OpenBSD).
Not to start YAFdistro war, I've never had a problem with other versions of RH or anything from debian. Each has their own goals, and I suppose each their own audience. Slackware just seems to me to be the best tradeoff between learning by getting your hands dirty and getting the results you need.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
As the summary of this post says, we all know to pretty much stay away from "point oh" software releases. While this is a common and currently wise choice, it is not correct. Why should we learn to accomodate that which is not perfect rather than striving to improve the imperfection.
The issue, among other things, is current software development practices, not specifically Red Hat. As there are many methods for higher quality (Read: Better.) software development, such as OOD *before* a single line of code is written, they are hardly given attention in even the most enterprise level environments. I think most of us can attest to this, and I also think most of us can see the fault in this practice. You do not begin building an automobile without first having run through design, logic, models, et cetera. Software should be no different. I'm not an idealist, software *can* kick ass, in even "point oh" releases, but we need to begin to swallow our pride and realise we're not capable of developing quality software, of any substantial size, without proper design practices and documentation first.
Regards
The posts on this story disturb me. Browsing at my usual Threshold:1 Highlight:3 Mode: Threaded (no penis birds or grits, thanks) all I'm able to see is a bunch of "see, linux sucks" evangelists. This is excepting the glorious Enoch Root, of course :P Rather than reply to each thread let's just point out a few things...
4 6212&cid=40
4 6212&cid=51
--snip--
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/10/02/20
"Why am I buying Linux?"
--snip--
Why, indeed. Personaly, I've never paid for a Linux distro and I've been running Linux for 5 years now. When I want to support the efforts of a particular group (i.e. the core kernel group, or the GNOME developers) I'll make a direct contribution to them.
--snip--
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/10/02/20
"Why should anyone get Linux if it has more bugs than Windows?"
--snip--
Can we say "Red Hat is NOT Linux"?
All in all a very low quality posting here, people. If you want a stable, tested distro get Slackware or Debian. If you want shiney buttons get Red Hat or Mandrake.
Yeah, I'm going back to Mandrake 7.1 .. hopefully their 7.2 won't enhance Redhat 7.0's bug.
Everything's so much better in Mandrake 7.1
-- Microsoft, Inc. http://www.microsoft.com
All of these bugs will be fixed in RedHat 7.0 Service Pack 1 Second Edition.
-- Microsoft, Inc. http://www.microsoft.com
Most haven't been verified, and a majority probably are not bugs, but people who didn't read what the changes were since 6.2.
-30-
The original "bug" is equivalent to someone replying to "I'm having (some problem) with Linux" with "I upgraded my Linux to Windows 2000 and the problem went away," here. I can't believe this was posted as a story; it's ridiculous.
In the interest of being pedantic, I should point out that it was Linus who said that; ESR just paraphrased him.
Jason.
I use SuSE :)
;)
The problem Red Hat has in a nutshell, is "RHAT". Because it is publicly traded, it must first be concerned with its margins and the easiest way to jack 'em up is "Hey, let's add some new drek and call it... seven Point Oh!" The corp heads are in agreement and voila - seven point oh.
SuSE has several things that I need:
1. European language support. SuSE GmbH is German and their distro is #1 in Europe.
2. A tricked-out KDE 2.0 with tons of apps, as well as a great deal of GNOME. (I use both simultaneously.)
3. A LOT of apps. 1600+. And their 7.0 Pro includes a DVD with the stuff. (No disk switching if ya got one
4. They are still private.
5. They sponsor UserFriendly.org for one cartoon a month. (Pitr's support in a cartoon probably didn't hurt either. [We put in SuSE or Pitr do evil things to you!])
I know, flamebait first class. I tried RH, then I put in the SuSE. SuSE was smoother than RH.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
38 of these are listed as "not a bug". ~58 of those listed are duplicates.
Maybe I'm not doing a proper query. Where is this bugzilla report coming from anyway?
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
I beleive the -pre18's have a workaround included now.
Cost of the six MS CD's that do the same thing, until you try to upgrade MS Explorer, Oh hundreds of dollars. OS $100, web server "pro edition" you tell me, Visual Studio who cares, spreadsheet editors, mail servers, DNS.... Way too much money. The days you spend installing it will never be recovered. Documentation, source, not available ever. How many bugs will you find? Tell me when you get to the bottom of your wallet. I had far fewer problems with Red Hat 6.0 and Debian 2.2 than I've ever had with any of MS's pathetic bloatware BSoD producer. Whip! get back on that upgrade treadmill.
You could get a mac or even a sun.
Where are all of these MicroTurds comming from? Has something shifted in the ORedmond Cloud, sending a storm of them down on our heads? What have we done to deserve such posts? Surely the low sales of Win2k were not intedned to disturb the rest of the computing universe?
Why am I responding to such a troll? Because I'm supposed to be doing my homework and it is boring!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Maybe everyone needs to take a look at the Microsoft hating bullshit they've been spouting for YEARS. When Windows 2000 came out, every Linux kiddie on the block was talking about how it had something like 64000 known bugs or something. So everyone has fun with thier lame little names like MicroBug, MicroSloth, Micro$oft, Winblows, etc. Acting like the OpenSource process renders everything 100% bug free and shit, and then look. Every new point zero version of Red Hat has had the same fucking issues. And what do the Linux kiddies say ? Nothing. Maybe you hyprocrites need to look at your own OS of choice and realize that EVERYONE has bugs. I have no problem with Microsoft bashing as long as it's founded. But when you have the kettle calling the pot black, you need to back down a bit.
For reference, I'm a FreeBSD guy, not a big MCSE Microsoft whore. I just don't like all the fscking hyprocricy. Critisize Microsoft for something they alone are guilty for. If you make fun of something because it has bugs, and you don't understand that the bigger the project, the more the bugs, then you're exposing yourself as someone who doesn't know shit about programming.
Moderate this down if you must, I know it could be considered flame-bait, but consider what I've said here. I'm not trolling, I am challenging the Linux community to respond the same way to Red Hat as it did to Microsoft when Windows 2000 came out.
I "downgraded" from Mandrake 7.1, and am basically happy I did. XFree86 4.0 has improved my graphics, installation was no major problem, and nothing has crashed so far, so where are all these bugs? Possibly in KDE2, Mozilla and the Linux 2.4.x kernel, but those are provided in a separate "preview" section, not installed by default. Of course, this was a clean install, so there might be horrors from upgrading a Red Hat installation.
I have a feeling that some disgruntled person had install problems and then decided to make RedHat take notice by posting on Linuxnewbie and Slashdot. (The "bug" that was cross posted was in Anaconda, the installation wizard).
Actually the only gripe I have is that I got a nasty surprise when my fresh install wouldn't boot, because of the 1024th cylinder problem. Mandrake 7.1 uses GRUB instead of LILO, so it boots beyond the 1024th cylinder. So, I added a small boot partition and it was smooth sailing from there.
-- "Linux helps those who help themselves"
I hate all this infighting among distros. Everyone who knows linux know that most distros have at least one or two redeeming qualities, even though RedHat might be one of the least. I personally use mandrake mostly, or the VALinux modded redhat, as I want the bleeding edge of everything, even if it means a crash every couple of weeks. I actually use BeOS mostly though, and I am forced into Windows until I can ditch my shitty Efficient USB DSL modem.
But for god's sake, stop with the distro war posts.
Shit adds up at the bottom...
Far more than a Windows box ?
The day you have half the driver support, half the functionality of the API, and anything close to a GUI besides that piece of shit XFree86, then you can talk about a complex OS. Look at QNX. That's a frickin OS. Don't compare your OS to Windows when it's apples to oranges.
More of this "sure RedHat 7 has many bugs, but not as many as Microsoft !!!" bullshit
My T-Shirt I got at DefCon 8 that says "Fuck RedHat", just went up in value :)
Wow... what's this? Another clueless story on Red at Linux where Debian fans can say something not very insightful and get scored up? Yahoo.
Quite so.
It looks like alan got a bit short someone's particularly useless bug report (Hint: It's bugzilla, not whine-zilla) and somebody else decided it was time for a jihad,
This is another case of a manifestly unresearched and innacurate story, released on a whim without a thought of due journalistic process. Most dissapointingly, it's come from CmdrTaco, who really should know better by now. And inserting "*grin*" into the article entry makes it no less snide. RH staff have every right to be annoyed at this unsubtle dig.
BTW, for what it's worth: I love RH, I love Debian (apt rules) and I love BSD. They all rock, and I use all of them!
-- Post No Gravy
Dumped it, using Mandrake 7.1, much better...
I really honestly don't understand the anti-RH sentiment in the slashdot crowd. So far, my desktop machine has been running like a rock since the release (Don't know for server installations). I got accelerated Q3A running in record time, the GNOME desktop is damn stable, the only bug I've seen is that xmms doesn't shutdown very well (filed with both RH and xmms.org). I have tried every major distro and always end up with RH. Mandrake 7.0 and 7.1 were the buggiest, most windows-esque distributions ever, and yet, you won't find an anti-mandrake stuff on /., except for the release anouncements...
....
RH employs a lot of smart people from the linux community. Would GNOME be as stable as it is today without the work of all the RHAD guys? I hope RH is successful and continues to agressively push linux in new directions
I thought it was called Brown Pants. As in the standard #freebsd Linux Lamer Cry:
"WAREZ MY BROWN PANTS LEENUX ?!"
Check out http://linux.aureal.com ... works for my MontegoII
all your spam are belong to
Let me start with the "my views are mine, and do not represent my employer, blah, blah..."
Now, some very hard choices were made for this release, things like i18n support were desperately needed, and so we have a gcc snapshot as the complier. Somehow this makes us evil, whatever. People want 2.4.x asap, and It will likely land before the next release, so we linked against 2.4 headers, so that it can droped in later. Again, evil, I know, how could we even try to make upgrade easier?
Of course, an older gcc is provided as 'kgcc' so that you can compile your kernels.
Okay, what, exactly, do we ship from Red Hat? Why, we ship 2.5 GIGS worth of community developed software in Red Hat Linux 7. THe bugs we track, for the most part, for the OVERWHELMING part, are not in Red Hat written code, they are in community code. I say this with confidence, because most of the software is community code.
Let me ask you, how many times have you heard about a bug in 'screen'? The number is not small, and every one we know about goes into bugzilla, and gets closed when it is decided that either a) it is fixed, or b) we can't fix it. Now, screen is one of many hundreds of packages.
I am very upset with this style of journalism: "Red Hat 7 Infested With Bugs", honestly, is this a tabloid? Anyone who has ever used a bug tracking system KNOWS how this sort of thing goes, and most of those bugs are in everyone else's distros as well, the only differance is that people are shouting about our counting them. So ask yourself, what does it accomplish by posting a story with a title like this, knowing that CmdrTaco understands everything I've just said?
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
It's simple: Redhat (as several other distributions are now doing) is shipping a different compiler for compiling kernels than for general compilation.
You need to edit the kernel Makefile and add the line CC=kgcc (making sure that kgcc is installed on your system). kernel compilations will then proceed without problems.
Although this is surprising to many users, it's actually a good idea. The linux kernel stresses a compiler in ways that a regular program (even something like all of gnome) just can't do. Kernel compilation demands correctness of inlined functions, or preprocessor command parsing, of lock orders. Basically, the kernel uses C as a convenient macro language for assembly much of the time. The compiler's job is to faithfully translate.
Given all of that, the compiler that you want for general purpose compilation is not necessarily the compiler that compiles the kernel best. The kernel and compilers co-evolve. If you follow either the linux-kernel list or any of the gcc or libc lists, you will see that when bugs turn up with kernel compilation, it is as often the case that there is a libc or a gcc bug as a kernel bug. These bugs frequently only turn up in the context of a kernel compile (because who the hell else would do something like that?!?)
Finally, on the subject of the redhat release: RedHat did some dubious things (calling their gcc gcc 2.96 when 2.96 just doesn't exist, thereby forcing the gcc project to renumber their release to 2.97 just to catch any RedHat bugs, eg.). However, I'm steadily impressed by Redhat as a distro (flame me if you want, I don't care). Redhat is a commercial distribution but they release *all* the software they develop as gpl open source (and have set the tone among other distributors to do the same), and have struck a good balance between novelty and stability.
Anyway, that's how to solve your kernel compiling problem (among lots of other stuff).
So what am i to do?
Quit being an idiot and running this bullshit. Download FreeBSD 4.1.1-STABLE and have a nice day. Fuck all this gay shit.
Except, that I happen to really like Linux. I am totally a Unix fan- I like the philosophy, I like the in-depth feel, I like the interfaces, I like the software, I like damn near everything about it. I do NOT like Windows. I have never used an NT, and probably never will, but my opinion of an OS with no CLI is inclined to be quite low. I use my computer for fun 80% of the time- sometimes, I want to play games- for that, I will suffer Windows 98. But most of the time, I like to be able to control every little aspect of my computer. True, I WON'T, but it's the same idea as having a fast car or big, um, nevermind- perhaps you won't spend all your time driving fast or, uh, nevermind again, but the fact that you CAN is just that much satisfaction. The software available for Linux is grossly in excess of that for Windows- the ONLY thing Windows does that Linux cannot, for me, at this point in time, is play several games. True, Wordperfect and Quattro Pro are more 'refined' than AbiWord and gnumeric, but both are improving- and what is there in Windows equivalent to genius (powerful bignum calculator), gimp, emacs, and a zillion other things? Sure, I could buy something like Mathematica for $X big number, Photoshop and Illustrator for $Y almost as big number, and everything else under the sun for a sum total of $Z tremendously huge number, but I never would. The Power of Linux is what I like.
Oh, and please note that s/Linux/whateverdistroorunixlikeOSyouprefer/; is in effect here- I just happen to use Linux. I have nothing against BSD or even Solaris. At any rate, to close a long rant (and to a troll- I should be ashamed), 'all of the above' is a ridiculous claim that has no bounds. And, of course, in Linux, I can hack up solutions for things I can't do, and expect to some extent help with them from others- the Open Source trade in Windows is pathetically small. If I ever see 'shareware' and 'freeware' again it'll be TOO GODDAMN SOON.
(end unproofread late-night rant)
I just bought and received a brand new AMD Athlon system last week. It runs Redhat 5.2 without a glitch, but that version only sees the first 8 GB of my drive. Redhat 6.2 will install, but not boot, due to a bug I just found out about (something about the wrong kernel getting installed). 7.0 should run fine, according to Redhat's site, but now it's apparently full of holes...
Seriously. I bought this box to run linux, and it's seeming more and more like it just won't be possible for another few months, in which case i really just should have waited for 7.1 to arrive. Any suggestions?
Very specious argument you have there.
I have something of a testbed box that occasionally does real world stuff, and it was running RH6.2 quite flawlessly as a mail server with exim (which I even compiled myself, wow I feel so cool, hehe).
:)
It was working great. I wanted to update it, so I redirected mail traffic to the NT mailserver (which I use when my exim one isn't up), and tried to do an update using an over-the-lan FTP install from another machine which had everything downloaded. (thats the only real way to get files to this box, its got no cdrom, I don't have a burner, etc)
Oops.
That rather happily trashed my existing install and made it unbootable by mysteriously dying halfway through. Couldn't get things to come back properly after that.
No big deal, its a testbed box really. So I trashed it, and did a clean install.
Got things back up and running smoothly. Got OpenSSH running again smoothly. Gotta say I like Sawfish. Tried to compile a 2.2.17 kernel to get rid of a lot of the crap that comes by default with RH that I just don't want.
With all kinds of wacky warnings and errors, that failed.
No biggie, figuring something was just wacky, I went back to 2.2.16 that had been working so well for me in RH6.2.
That will compile, but when I do "make modules", there is some other wacky "pasting token" errors, and it fails.
By now I'm starting to get a bit frustrated. Not being a programmer, I don't really know what to do. It just worked before, and now it just doesn't.
So how does this get filed? If there is a bug, I have no idea just where it is. Maybe its in the new version of GCC, maybe its somewhere else. I don't know, and I don't know how to find out. But somewhere, something is wrong, since it worked flawlessly on 6.2 not three hours earlier. I don't think its anything I did, since I did a clean install this system is very much a stock install and not like the ragtag wacky mix of stuff that my 6.2 install had become.
So I dunno, I'm finding it to be a nice release with this one very nagging issue. Everything else has been flawless (well, OpenSSH doesn't like public key encryption if strictmode is on, but I think I'm doing something wrong there).
Tomorrow, I'll go over the bug reports and see if there is something about this happening to somebody else.
I will say that aside from compiling stuff, I'm really liking RH7.0.
(tomorrow I'm also going to see if I can compile exim, if I can't do that, then I'll probabl have to drop back down to RH6.2 until this can be figured out, because I really prefer exim over the NT mailserver I've got working right now.)
sorry about the rambling nature, its late.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
You should know as well as me, that if you install in 1.5GB you install A LOT of unnecessary stuff.
Do a smaller install, or remove the unwanted stuff.
The reason it takes up more space is for instance that the SQL-part has been expanded with MySQL, as it has been made GPL. There are A LOT of new multimedia-applications etc.
If you installed without regard to this fact, you ended up with BOTH PostgreSQL AND MySQL, and this duplication in most other areas as well.
Please try to do a more minimal install before you scream "bloat".
It hasn't changed in years... 2 releases per year, 6 months apart... /Simon
Anyone from Red Hat out therec are to comment?
Not quite. Debian unstable is too fast-paced for my taste. I've run it for a couple years, so I know what I'm talking about. It's mostly solid, but with ocassional glitches which can be very annoying. The problem is that it essentially encourages yous to upgrade everything, even the very basic OS stuff, every few days.
The middle ground I think would be FreeBSD (which I just started running on a new machine). The separation between the base system and the ports really makes sense; the ports are being upgraded constantly, while the base system is on a slower release schedule (but ages faster than Debian stable). Some time ago on the debian-devel list suggested splitting Debian into several independently managed collections to speed things up, which happens to be similar to what FreeBSD has in place.
But still, people should keep an eye on the Debian experimental testing distribution, which aims to be intermediate between stable and unstable. The page doesn't seem to have been updated in a while, though.
is an old-school, no shit ass-reaming flame.
Well done, Enoch!
More like 149 if you drop the RESV,DUPL and NOTA's
(Resolved, Duplicate, Not A Bug)
Offtopic:
Why aren't there more women in "geek" jobs?
Because so many of them think they will be discriminated against. And once the brain starts down that path, anything that could be viewed as discrimination or sexism is.
Net result: Enough guys in "geek" jobs who have been mistreated (and yes, falsely accusing people of stereotyping is just as bad as the stereotyping itself) by over-sensitive women that they are treated differently.
Congratulations on helping to perpetuate this trend.
Try it yourself.
product: red hat linux
version: 7.0
status: new, assigned, reopened
severity: security, high, normal, low
returns: 137 bugs, 42 security or high severity, most trivial.
I wonder what kind of crack Taco's been smoking today...
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Upgraded from RH 6.0 (never bothered to upgrade to .1 or .2, sinc it was working fine, aside from security patches). The only problem I ran into was with the new .rpmsave & .rpmnew system. It moved /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession to /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession.rpmsave AND it put the new Xsession in as .rpmnew (leaving me with no plain Xsession file). I wasn't able to log in to X until I rectified the situation.
:P
Other than that, though, RH7 has been a dream. It recognized my second ethernet card, and I'm now able to play with ipchains and samba and all sorts of 'neato' stuff.
So far I don't see any other bugs either. They must all be in programs that I don't use.
-- Fester
-- Fester
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
Why am I buying Linux?
Because your 'net pipe is too slow to suck down an ISO loike the rest of us?
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
I use Slackware on desktop and OpenBSD on servers :)
No problem. Thanks for responding to my troll!
Why do people keep saying this? It is indeed currently true for many programs, but it should not be. I am continually amazed by the number of people that just accept "never use x.0 versions, because they're going to be buggy". Software should be tested extensively before a x.0 release, and the new major version number only applied when the program is ready.
</rant>
Now, I've never used Redhat, so I'm not really qualified to comment on it, but I like the way Debian releases. When they put out a new "stable" release, it has gone through extensive public testing. There are still things that fixed subsequently--nobody is ever going to be perfect--but the problems are very few.
--Phil (I'm going to have to install Redhat one of these days, just so I can compare it to Debian.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
What the heck are you talking about? The original links work just fine here.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
...will NOT be missed this time around! ;>
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
This is a letter I sent to RedHat earlier this week:
----------
I am writing to you as a RHCE, an investor, a former reseller, and a (potential) distributor.
My question is a simple one that I believe requires an answer in one form or another.
Why can I download the latest version of RedHat 7 yet I can not buy it in a local store? Would it not benefit us to have the media IN THE CHANNEL BEFORE YOU ANNOUNCE THE RELEASE?
I am aware that it can be purchased online. But why would I more inclined to purchase something from your web site than get it for free FROM THE SAME LOCATION?
I understand this may fly in the face of Open Source sensibilities, but wouldn't it be better to have the media in the stores on the day of the announcement, THEN, LATER have it on the ftp site?
As much as you may dislike the practices of your competitors in the closed-source world, it is important to borrow at least one page from their playbook and learn to distribute to your advantage. Pay close attention to the people lining up at 12 Midnight to buy Windows 95 - This is the same mentality of the people who are eager to buy RedHat 7.
This does not even address the ability to ship a pre-configured workstation or server with the latest version of your distribution. On the day of "release", why is it not possible to call Dell or other major manufacturers / distributors and purchase a piece of hardware with RedHat 7? Should a customer want to evaluate the latest version of your software for a project, it would make sense that they would want to purchase a "certified", pre-configured server with the latest version. Yet, the best you have to offer is the ability to download it(, or buy from the same location).
Thank you,
William Favorite
Not to start a holy war.. But I really admire Debian for holding out and wanting everything perfect in a release, and I admire Redhat's approach of rapid frequency releasing.. But can't we get a middle ground? Either way, it's still fewer bugs that Microsoft Windows!
Is how quickly they'll get fixed.
Is anyone surprised?
They're using a development version of gcc, for one thing; it complains about all sorts of random things.
I haven't installed it all, mind you, because I just got my system halfway stable with 2.4.0-test8. (with arla, reiserfs, and whatnot...)
There's nothing wrong with being bleeding-edge, but I'm at least waiting for the updates...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If I had the mod. points, this post would go straight into the dumpster... Flamebait, but since it's a man-hating feminist posting, we have to be nice to her, and mod her up...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
wanna fight?
Well gees, they must have stolen some bugs from windows ME
Theres one problem with reflecting your reality, sometimes your reality starts to reflect you.
The biggest bug in RH7 is the compiler. GCC 2.96/glibc 2.whatever.they.ship is not binary compatible with previous releases. When I installed the RH7.0 upgrade I had to recompile most of my glibc binaries. This is _bad_. Especially since one of these binaries was KDE2.0 from cvs (took many hours). Also the compiler seems to be twice as slow as the previous gcc.
/home/httpd completely - a dir I mysteriously had forgotten in my backup list. *d'oh*
The upgrade was also a problem. It wiped out my
kpackage is broken - segfaults all over the place.
Ugh I could go on...
Debian is hard to install.
Is still really true anymore? Granted, I'm not exactly a Linux newbie, but the simple installation option, where you install collections instead of individual packages, aren't that bad.
Je ne parle pas francais.
I didn't see you sticking up for W2K when a reported 1,000,000 bugs were found in an early release. Let RH stand on its own, and don't apologize for it. If it's good, it'll emerge, and it doesn't need Slashdot - the 'Linux Gestapo' - to relentlessly promote it to geeks.
The root user is a "serious problem" that people should be aware of? I take it you're joking :)
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
The S.u.S.E distribution is way bigger than RH ever will be, and they are sure as hell not delivering anything that doesn't work properly. That's German craftmanship for you...
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
It's a pro-linux site. For fuck's sake, what did you expect?
Slashdot has it's own biases, just like every other media source you ever saw/read.
You're an adult, cope.
"Apparently, according to reports on bugzilla and on linuxnewbie.internet.com, Red Hat 7.0 is being described by some people as one of the buggiest distros they've seen in recent history."
I heard this article has the most buggiest hyperlinks in recent history. Try clicking on any of them.The releases kind of seem like they reflect the decades of the 20th century. I only lived through 2.5 of those decades so this is purely based on how those decades have been portrayed to me.
4.0 -1940s new world
5.0 - 1950s innocence
6.0 - 1960s uprising, idealistic
7.0 - 1970s sobering, greed?
The begining of every decade is a little foggy. WWII, ?, Korea, Vietnam. Whatever, I don't even agree with myself anymore.
I'd rather go with slow-and-low without the bugs than fast-and-furious that's useless. When I put Red Hat on a machine, it is NEVER the latest and greatest. I usually start with the last in the series (4.1, 5.2, 6.2) and then apply all the patches. Forget the .0 altogether!
Same here. I downloaded the 2 iso's from ibiblio.org, did a clean install of the old Dell workstation at work, and couldn't be happier. I'm actually installing it on an old HP Vectra 486/25NI upgraded with a Pentium OverDrive chip, with 3 NIC's. Why would I do such a thing? Download the latest 2.4.0-test kernel, get the user space iptables code, and go to town.
As for the servers at work, yes, they will not be upgraded to 7.0 for at least a little while. Each .0 release, IMO, has gotten better by a factor of 10.
As for the number of bugs, all I'm concerned about are 1. the showstoppers, and 2. the security bugs. So far, I haven't seen any (doesn't mean they aren't there, but I haven't been bitten by one yet).
And you actually prefer Netscape?
The only problem I have seen with 7.0 is the inability to compile kernels (2.2.17 / 2.4.0-test8), which forced me to abandon 7.0 altogether. Reading the RedHat bugzilla postings, they mention that the Release-Notes discribe the simple workaround for this. I don't normally read release-notes because they tend to contain nothing more than fluff, but RedHat does have some good info in there, however there is NO mention of the CC=kgcc work-around... This was a definite oops. I forgive them, but it was a serious mistake from a developer point of view. N0GNU (Ham radio callsign [really!], not anti GNU)
Try disabling the loading of the agp-gart module, it's interacting badly with some machine.
You should not be using headers in /usr/include/{linux,scsi,asm} when compiling a kernel module. Use the headers in the appropriate kernel source tree.
Oops, forgot to spell-check my post
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
It's not "your fantastic", that doesn't make sense as the sentence could be replaced with "you are fantastic" which would be more proper.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
It is sort of ironic that I read this post after unsuccessfully trying for a long time to download redhat 7.0 from erm...I think linuxberg.org or something...My FTP client (WS_FTP) kept giving me all sorts of problems...or it could have been my internet connection or a number of other variables...but, the outcome is that I gave up attempting to download it, and then I happened to read this article. I think I will just wait until .1 or so comes out then.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think is th
The anti-salmon
It installs kernel 2.2 and X 3.3 normally; 2.4prewhatever is an optional "preview" and X 4 servers get installed if X 3 doesn't support your card.
What told him you're a guy is the Queen's English, in which all indefinite pronouns are assumed to be masculine.
Don't like it? Learn Esperanto. Or change the language -- I think Mr. Katz has some words about his luck with that.
Or get a grip. Sheesh. Your post doesn't say a lot for your gender, you know -- if you ARE female; please note you never explicitly said so, that I could tell anyways.
I'm gonna pay for this, I'll wager, but who cares? Them's the rules of English, and I'm not budging.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
I haven't used Red Hat 7 so I don't know exactly what its like, and I'm not a major Red Hat user. However I do suspect the problems arn't directly Red Hats. Systems like Kernel 2.4, latest gcc, latest XFree 4, KDE-2 still have some problems, and I don't regard them ready for mainstream. Yes, you can get them going fairly well with the right hardware and know how.
Customers ask for the impossible they want the latest but they also want it proven to work.
'My' particular bug http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?i d=17988 is caused by a sheer lack of testing. I have encountered at least four other people who cannot boot with PCMCIA drivers on their Toshiba notebook pc's.
.0 release. Then again, there is no excuse for shipping an os that kernel panics when you boot up!
I can't complain though, it's my my own fault for wasting a saturday afternoon installing a
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I did a query on bugzilla for 7.0 - RedhatLinux and it only returned 167 bugs.
Kinda ironic that the Bugzilla link doesn't work. Chalk up another one.
Check out http://linuxnewbie.internet.com/ if you are interested in the site. It is just something like Slashdot, so I would not bother. Basically, you should read http://bugzilla.redhat .co m/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18033
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
I mean, everyone know never to use x.0 unless they want to be literally bleeding edge?
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
- Joe
-Joe
M3 T00! It's working fine on several of my computers, with the exception of a AGP problem on my i815 machine (not Redhat's fault - the kernel driver stupidly doesn't function on an 815 when you don't use the on-board video). Rebuilding the kernel fixed that just fine.
:)
I suspect the real reason this story exists is because Rob and co are known Debian bigots, but Slashdot conspiracy theories are so tiresome
Slackware Linux. 6-9 months between releases. Always stable, always high quality. No need for Red Hat's "release bugs" or Debian's "release after the next ice age" extremes. You can have release often and release stable :)
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I have always known that the .0 releases of RH have been bad, this is a known fact, but I think that RH should tell people about it too. It would be very nice if RH classed .0 alpha, .1 beta and .2 stable, as it is in RL.
Ah well, I will be sticking with DEBIAN anyhoo :)
This article, while tangentially related to Red Hat software, should really be in a category titled something like, "Let's start a flame war". Or are we supposed to think that Cmdr Taco doesn't realize that this will devolve into a Windows vs. Linux or Debian/Slack vs. Corporate Linux religious war before the "First Post" is moderated "offtopic", "flamebait", or "troll" (and really, how hard is it, moderators, to choose one of the above consistently for completely irrelevant posts)?
I do not have a signature
I've found precisely two - a trivial bug in the Powertools version of junkbuster, and some (perhaps) excessively zealous permissions in mysql. Everything else is fine for me, and I've got far too much installed!
Crivens, CT, we all know you're a Debian fan, so please give it a rest.
-- Post No Gravy
Story reads...
"Today, a newbie, in an experiment gone bad, allowed bugs to escape from bugzilla. They quickly escaped via the internet only to find a new host in RedHat."
Well, doesn't that suck. Sounds like something right out of one of the tabloids. A newbie pulls a bogus figure of his ass and gives it to RedHat.
Yesterday, I was comptemplating ugrading to 7.0 from 6.1 (which has run flawlessly for me). Then, I read some BS about 2500 bugs and instead decided to wait with my upgrade until 7.1. This morning, revised figures are posted by people that understand the process a wee bit more. Those new numbers come in around under 200 bugs.
200 bugs in a release as large as RH 7? Wow. If only most commercial software shipped with as few bugs. Take into consideration that most of these bugs are probably in community written code rather than RedHat written code. These are mostly bugs we've come to live with and are probably being patched as I write this.
What's a shame is that the original story will probably be picked up by MSNBC, CNN or some other news agency and the revised figures will not. Thus, people who may have upgraded or purchaced 7.0 may not do so now. Instead, they may continue to view Linux, in general, as buggy software that can not be trusted. Articles like this only perpetuate this myth.
I only hope that before posting potentially damaging material, that somebody actually check the figures before they are posted to the public. It strikes me as poor journalism, a disservice to the community and utter criminal negligience to do otherwise.
BTW...I'm going to upgrade to 7.0 today.
RD
www.linuxnebie.org and www.bugzilla.redhat.com
Redhat 7 should have never been released. It's a shot at being the first 2.4 distro out (out BEFORE 2.4 itself is ready).
Mistake...
It seems to me this was bottom up made to be a 2.4 system all ready to go. It's shipped before the pacages it relys on are ready.
I understand why RedHat 7 was made this way what I don't understand is why they released it NOW...
If this is a race... then declare RedHat disqualifyed for jumpping the gun...
I don't actually exist.
Grr - so that's why I had to fix two things in the Blackbox source to get it to compile? Oh whell.
I'm planning on making a Squid cache proxy server... and am trying to decide what distro to use. I have SUSE 7, Mandrake 7.1 and Red Hat 6.2. I was gonna go with RH6.2 .. is it worth using Red Hat 7.0 ??
(ignore the sig.. posting with dreaded MSIE5)
--
Azrael - The Angel of Death
Yes, it's true RedHat has bugs, but I've been using 6.0 for some time now with no problems. True I don't use the X environment but when i did I ran 5.2 and I liked it. Maybe just personal tollerance.. i don't know.
Matt
Remember, Windows ME is probably even buggier than Red Hat 7; it's just that it's not open-source, so that the yellow-journalist media has a harder time witchhunting bugs. Give Red Hat a fair shake here. They're doing the best they can here, and throwing accusations at them because their software doesn't work perfectly 100% of them is counter-productive.
Computer 1: It's a Pentium III 550 HP NetServer.
SCSI 2 w/512 megs Ram.
I spent the whole of last night trying to get it installed over the network (didn't work). Would hang in the final process of the installation. I finally waited for the ISO to download and then tried to re-install the system w/the CD.
Everything seemed to work fine. I went through the installation process and when it came time to reboot the machine it FROZE SOLID on the 'Initializing Swap Space' message in init level 1.
I then went through and re-installed it again w/different partition settings , etc . 3 times total when I finally gave up.
I re-installed the machine with RedHat 6.2 and it worked fine. So much for my daring attempt at a x.0 release
...
I have a home machine that I use as a development server and it is a Athlon 750 w/512 megs of ram. Not a SCSI system but a UDMA/66 IDE System.
The machine was able to install correctly, but the interesting thing is durring times of VERY heavy stress to the system.. (Seti@Home or 3D Screen Saver) the machine hard locks. I have been running Mandrake 7.0 on this machine for 4 months and have never had a lockup.
I am guessing that there is a problem somewhere in the kernel that they provided or one of the libraries that they have compiled in that is causing some of these problems.
I have read as well in the kernel mailing list that there is a bit of hoop-da-la about the version of the compiler that RedHat uses.
Now, they are trying to get support in for the 2.4.x kernel as why I am trying to be brave in installing the system as a x.0 release. I believe as it is a bit of a moving target for redhat, there should be a bit of patience and support for them.
I do expect to see a lot of problems and issues as the 2.4 kernel roles out and everyone makes the necesary transitions to make everything run very smooth.
My opinion is simple. If you want rock solid, no bugs.. or at least worked out stable distro's.. don't go with a release that is not only a x.0 release, but a 1 week old release.
Use soemthing that is tried and tested.. such as Debian X (I am not a debian user, but they are a bit slower to release and tend to be more reliable (from what I hear))
The nice thing about RH 7.0 is you can help them out. You can install it yourself (assuming it boots.. (see case 1)) and re-install packages, recompile the kernel.. etc.
It is nice having all the latest and greatest libraries and such installed. It seems that the unfortunatley my RH 6.2 servers are going to be running RH 6.2 much longer than I anticipated based on my initial reaction though. (I will wait for the 7.1 version for any more non-private use..)
Be easy on RH as they do contribute a lot to the comunity. I don't believe that they should be lynched for taking chances on new technologies.
--------------------
If Slashdot were a print medium, they'd have been out on their collective asses a long time ago!
As you should know, some percentage (probably a large one) of the "65,000" bugs in Win2k are comments saying "I would have liked to do this differently", performance issues (IE, this could be faster), and bugs that never got cleared.
Windows 2000 was the first Microsoft OS to truly get its turn in the barrel for QA. They QA'd it very strictly and by their standards, almost anything was a "bug". It would be interesting to know how many of the bugs were actually bugs, but we may never have that piece of information.
Also, while a typical linux distribution has far more applications/packages than a windows distribution, consider Windows 2000 Advanced Server. In addition to all the usual windows bundled nonsense (four games, paint, three editors (one for the commandline, and one of which is a pretty fair copy of M$ Word 4), a fairly full-powered (if slow and security-loose) web/ftp server, an SMTP server, and the like, it also comes with clustering services, load balancing, and a whole bunch more. All versions of win2k come with a bunch of cute TCP services. Server and advanced server come with an Appletalk suite that beats the pants off netatalk in most categories.
Personally, I prefer linux or other unices to windows as a server. But windows does come with an awful lot of software, too. Those 65,000 bugs are most likely spread out across everything that's bundled with the OS - and that's quite a bit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes .. you make some good points. I do appreciate that Win2K is very big and has a lot in it.
"would be interesting to know how many of the bugs were actually bugs, but we may never have that piece of information"
Well, IIRC, whatsisname who distributed the memo said something like '23000 of those bugs could be "real issues" for consumers'. In other words, at least 23000 are more than just performance considerations. And 23000 is a couple orders magnitude bigger than 200.
I quite like Win2k. It's far from perfect; I have encountered quite a few bugs, and have even gotten the system to freeze up or totally crash a few times - but as someone who has to work mostly on Windows 98, it's a complete pleasure to work on. Linux has been the most stable OS I've ever developed for, by far, but the somewhat crude development tools (Visual Studio is really very good) make it slightly painful to develop on. For my Linux development I usually map my Linux home dir via SMB over the network onto a Windows box, put the two computers next to each other, and write code in Visual Studio while building the program in Linux :)
I don't think it's really fair to use MSPaint as an example of an application, it's several orders of magnitude smaller than gimp or photoshop. And, of course, a typical linux distro has several paintbrush type programs, not just gimp. And literally dozens of games (probably between 50 and 100.)
"Those 65,000 bugs are most likely spread out across everything that's bundled with the OS - and that's quite a bit"
I suspect that most of them are related to specific hardware devices; the sort of bugs that are real bugs, but are unlikely to affect the majority of users.
To an extent this is a bit of an apples/oranges comparison, given the rather different nature of a Win2k installation and a 'typical linux installation'. I guess this is why people start to resort to trying to analyze software engineering with measurements like "Lines Of Code per bug" (or sometimes "bugs per LOC" :) .. naturally this is a far from perfect measurement (since it doesn't take into account the complexity of a piece of code); nonetheless I wonder how Linux and Win2k would fare in such a comparison?
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology, in the Jargon File. Of Course were supposed to find and fix bugs, but this is more a 'rate' thing. Its not like anyone designed linux and everything we ship in a distro from the ground up, this software evolved, and is still evolving.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Its hosing link posts, take the extra space out, and the previous link will work.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
> Software should be tested extensively before a x.0 release, and the
.DLL conflict. If we'd just rolled that into production, we would have lost a good day's work while trying to scramble around and do a rollback.
> new major version number only applied when the program is ready.
I will not deny this; however, NO software, NO operating system -- whether it be open source, closed source, Red Hat, Windows, Debian, *whatever* -- should ever be installed into a production environment without extensive custom testing by the business that is deploying the software.
It doesn't matter if it's an X.0 release, though yes, historically they have been buggier -- basically because anything X.0 is radically different from the previous versions.
As an example, my company runs on NT. We recently decided to apply SP6A. Brought it into the QA lab, installed the SP, and realized that our call tracking software promptly shuffled up the curtain and joined the choir invisible. Checked through all of the information on the SP, trying to find WHY it was having problems -- and eventually traced it, no surprise, to a
People, this is why we have QA departments. Or should. Don't depend on the vendor to test things. They *do* test things, but they can't test things with your environment, your configurations, and your needs.
--R.
"RFC 882: We put the . in
I do bash RedHat on a regular basis after the hassles I had with 6.0 and 6.1 (broken KDE anyone?). I'm much happier with Mandrake, who actually seem to test their software before releasing it. RedHat should be held accountabe, so flame away. This is what happens when marketing/directors decide when a product is ready, not the people that are actually doing the work. Thank you RedmondHat for bringing MS's working practices to the Linux world :-(
I put 7.0 on one machine at home.
My sound card was supported with redhat 6.1. It
wasn't supported in redhat 6.2. It is again
supported in redhat 7.0. That's good.
My video card, an older ATI model, still doesn't
work at 32bpp - it crashes often at 32bpp. At
16bpp it's mostly ok. So that hasn't changed.
The Blackdown java 1.1.8 that I had been using
to run cgoban 2.x, now segfaults.
My kermit executable (libc5) doesn't work at all.
AbiWord 0.7.something, probably 0.7.9, segfaults.
I had to recompile gtk-xemacs, because the requisite version of ncurses was no longer present.
When I logged into my account the first time after the reinstall, it asked me if I wanted to ditch my old drawers and stuff. I now wish I'd kept them. I have to wonder just how much was added by ditching them.
It's pretty different: xinetd, lprng, xfree86 4.0, library differences. We're probably going to have to start yet another copy of our software library for another version of redhat at work. And we're probably going to put off adopting 7.x at work for a while.
I don't mind that they dropped libc5. It's about time actually. If nothing else, libc5 executables appear to hate $LD_PRELOAD, and I make fairly heavy use of that.
I applaud the decision to have most things turned off by default. My security role at work will probably eventually be a less-large part of my job as a result. It's been tough teaching people who don't care about computers, that they -need- to do maintenance or they're endangering other people on our network.
I'm glad I have redhat 7.0 at home. I don't mind having something a little bleeding edge at home. But at work, things have to work; we're paid to make sure things work.
Can someone recommend a similar site that doesn't rely on Bashdotters to generate traffic?
Why am I buying Linux?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I've been running Red Hat 7.0 for a little while. Things I've noticed:
/etc/rc.d/init.d, but have added /etc/init.d as a link for the Solaris users among us.
/etc/fstab: I dislike this. I used to go to /etc/fstab to find the device name of my various partitions. Now it just says "LABEL=/usr" instead of "/dev/hdb6".... This is consistent with the change to fstab where the label name is shown during fsck. I guess I understand the desire to display that information, but dammit, I want my fstab back.
.1 release, the fact that it's a .0 blows me away.
* I expected the first XFree86 4.0 release to be a little wonky, but it works well! Handled both my Permedia and Voodoo3 cards just fine with no user intervention (though, it's annoying that my monitor was not recognized, but it never was under the older X either).
* They've adopted a SysV/Solaris-like set of symlinks for the rc files. I like this. They still use the Red Hat style of
* Disk labels in
* Just the right balance of new vs old software. The kernel is 2.2 (wise, even though 2.4.0-test is pretty darn stable as far as I can tell); I hear gcc is a snapshot release, but I have compiled a whole hell of a lot with it so far; latest GNOME goodies are nice (not quite Helixcode nice)
* No problems yet. I've installed on two systems. One was having problems under both Windows and Linux, and the upgrade did not help, but did not hurt. The other was a test system, where I wanted to play with squid, and all worked just fine.
Things that scare me overall:
* Big distribution for Red Hat
* Semi-graphical LILO ala Corel
* xntp becomes ntp, which breaks a lot of scripts, and it's not on disk1
Looks good for a
Before your next tough decision ask yourself "What would ESR do?"
What would Eric S. Raymond do, if he were here right now?
You can bet he'd write a flame or two, that's what Eric S. Raymond'd do.
When Eric S. Raymond was in the Cathedral, writing proprietary code
He learned how much big business sucks, and wrote the GPL
When Eric S. Raymond was in the Congo, hunting killer apes
He used his magical flaming pen and trashed the KDE
When Eric S. Raymond traveled through time, to the year 3010
He fought and stopped the ghost of Bill Gates
Monopolizing the planet again.
What would Eric S. Raymond do if he were here right now?
You can bet he'd kick an ass or two, that's what Eric S. Raymond'd do.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
So maybe QA should be one of the first things that Red Hat bolsters with the newfound resources they've gained, should they drop the SPARC port! ;>
There's a surprising amount in common between Linux fanatics and religious fundamentalists.
Actually, not that surprising, with some people here Linux IS a religion, and anyone who dare not praise it to the highest is a filthy heretic!
Yeah, I agree with you. Microsoft have bugs, so they're crap. Redhat have bugs, but that's to be expected as the distro grows...
Right. Any software above a certain level of complexity is bound to have bugs, no matter who produces it. FACT.
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Lesse here.. Cost of Win2K, around $400 or so. Cost of RH7 ISOs I downloaded: $0.00. For $400, I EXPECT the bugs to be worked out. For a free distro of a great OS, I can live with a few bugs that will be corrected shortly. Jesus, you're a dumbfuck.
If this post were about how buggy the latest release of Windows x.0 was, everyone would be screaming for blood. But since it's Linux, I suppose we can tolerate buggy software. Right.
Someone forgot to insert the leading http:// protocol identifiers for the links in the story, and MSIE 5.5 (here) is generating goofy URLs by inserting http://slashdot.org/ in front of them there links!
Proper URLs:
"I have installed RedHat 7.0 on over 15 servers all ready. So far it has been rock solid."
Good for you. I hope they're not production boxes. Since you say "servers" it sounds like they are. Congratulations - you are on the boss' official Shit List, and in general - clueless. In a normal production environment, you install and test your software first - then roll it out to the production machines. Since Red Hat 7 hasn't been out all that long, you've apparently done rigorous testing.
"Second, that is not a discussion forum, but a bugzilla database. Bugzilla is for bugs, not user comments. User comments belong on the mailing lists, on the RedHat newsgroups, in e-mails to the RedHat support addresses, in phone calls, and in letters, but NOT IN BUGZILLA!"
No problem there. Then just say so in a normal fashion. Implying that one's own product could suck is just bad form - and bad PR as is saying "then return it."
Happy?
Buggy url's in a story about a buggy release. Go figure. :-)
Corrected URL's:
Bugzilla
and
Linux Newbie.
A more specific link for Bugzilla.
Whee.
More like 19 if you count only HIGH or SECURITY. (Posted from a test RH 7.0 Box)
Sheesh! Did you bother to read the post before flaming? The word "scope" specifically. NT5 is not for embedded systems - as he said, it's a generic OS. You dont use it to control nuclear plants. You use a much smaller, dedicated system for all critical mechanisms. With failsafe.
-- Sig Sig Sputnik
Turtle Beach Montego drivers. Here's a hint: use Slackware.
-Antipop
Sure they should be held accountable, if they've truly released a horribly buggy sytem. But it doesn't sound like they have. Alan Cox, in his diary says:
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I used and Promise FastTrak66 IDE RAID controller to kill them. But that didn't work, so I just tried regular Raid. That worked better.
-----
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
Just thought I'd pass this along... RH7 won't let us install VMWare on a box so we can get to our dirty MS SQL 7 Server.... because of the 2.4 headers, it can't compile its kernel module.
Argh.... oh well, we found a win box to use instead.
Still love you Red Hat... just a little frustrated right now.
- Open source doesn't need project management.
- All bugs are shallow given enough eyeballs.
The first of these was recently disproven, by simply pointing out that all successful open source projects use a strong management model.
The second is disproven by the lingering effects of thousands of bugs in every large open source project, such as Linux and Mozilla. The bug curves merely increase. Mozilla no longer supports their bug chart feature in bugzilla because the almost monotonically increasing curve was too embarassing. Debian and RedHat Linux distributions constantly grow in number of bugs.
And no, the bugs in the new distro are not all or mostly new; as this bug states:
That is, nine out of ten of these bugs have already been out in front of the alleged pool of bug-fixing eyeballs for a significant time.
Bug fixing is hard and unrewarding work. Anyone who has led or managed engineers knows that it is often difficult to get them to clean up after themelves. In the open source world, nearly the only bugs that get fixed by people who are not paid to work on the project are the few high-profile status bugs -- the rest simply lie fallow, many for all time.
what comes with most scanners.
All generalizations are false
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I've done installs on many machines. Not 67 but probably around 20-30, of the various incarnations, and the installs have gone quite well. Of course hardware is a huge factor, and may account for the differences in opinion. If you're a reseller or turnkey solutions provider you might want to consider standardizing upon certain hardware configurations. I've even done different distro installs and to be honest I haven't seen a damn bit of difference, except maybe file placement.
Brian Seppanen
Minister of Information and Propaganda
Area 54 The Secret Government Disco Labs Provo
>girls aren't in more jobs cuz their dumb! Let's see here... I would wager a guess that you havent met many real girls or women in you life have you? But if you are going to make inflamatory remarks, at least use proper grammar and word choice. What you just said, is that Girls are not in more jobs cuz (sic) their dumb, which translates to: girls are not emploued cuz (what the hell does cuz mean? I thought it was slang for cousin) of something to do with dumbs that they own. Learn english before you bother trolling. I dont mind trolls, I do mind unintelligent ones.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
In Microsoft Windows 2000, both 5.0 (boxed) and 5.01 (sp1), there is a limit of two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs in a single VDM (virtualized DOS machine). This severely limits the usefulness of DJGPP, as it relies on three nested DPMI programs (GNU make, gcc, cpp/cc1/as/ld) to build programs.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is actually for the reply's to the the parent message:
Using an X.0 release of just about anything for any mission critical, potentially embarassing and market image damaging application is just poor judgement, unless you're an absolute wiz at debugging code on the fly while the clock is ticking and customers are getting upset. There would have to be someing in 7.0 that's not in 6.2 to justify the risk of using unproven code on a production machine. How long did people use Win 3.0? Win95-nonOSR2? Win98-nonSE? NT-noSP's? With that number of bugs there must be lots of neat new stuff, but we never make pretentions of being so bloody good nobody should use anything else. As a professional I'd stick with 6.2 for serious work and test 7.0 in the lab untill enough eyeballs have enough time to scrutinize the code. This IS open source, release early, release often.
1) Cheap
2) Good
3) Fast - choose any two.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Moron - this isn't 65,000 in bugs, and this isn't just the Windows and base OS either (er, and web browser). That 65k was in WINDOWS ALONE.
Complain about something that doesn't make you look like an idiot please - what is it with all these people who think Slashdot is *always* forgiving of Linux and harsh on MS under the same scenario? Pay attention, the scenarios are never the same.
4. The virtualized DOS machine (VDM) allows only two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs (NT 4 and all Win9x systems allow several dozen). The DJGPP environment requires at least three (make, gcc, cc1plus) nested DPMI programs.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's not entirely clear what you're trying to say here. I have no problem with criticism of Redhat based on fair and accurate information. Repeating an erroneous report that Redhat 7.0 has over 2000 outstanding bugs is neither fair or accurate.
Geez...is it really *that hard*? /data/backup/tarballs/linux-2.2.17.tar.bz2 /usr/src/
/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.17; cp System.map /boot/
/etc/lilo.conf
# cp
# tar xvyf linux-2.2.17.tar.bz2
# cd linux
# make config
# make dep; make bzImage; make modules; make modules_install; cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage
# vim
# shutdown -r now
No charge...clue-by-four thwacks are free, of course.
So far, I haven't had any real problems with RH 7.0. I haven't put it on my server machine because I'm waiting for more info, but so far, so good.
---Joe Merlino gnupg public key ID: 1E91EBAF
I bet if it was Windows you would be all over it.
worse is better.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
The CORRECT links are:
www.linuxnewbie.org
www.bugzilla.redhat.com
PPPLLLLLEEEEEAAASSSEEE - RedHat is a kitchen sink package. They include every good tool on the net, not all of which you need. It is trivial to get it installed into 400 Megs (including GNOME) if you want to. I have it installed on a laptop with only 600 Megs available.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Beautiful, Enoch. That was perfectly written. Thank you for taking the frustration with Open Source zealtos and putting into words.
--------------------------
This *is* open source software, right?
Option 1: Fix them. Quit bitching and pitch in. Make it better for everyone. If you don't want to/can't help fix them, at least report them so they *can* be fixed.
Option 2: Shut up and don't use Red Hat's Distro. It's really that simple.
Perspective: It could be worse. 137 or whatever << 65000 as in Win 2K!!!
Now reopen linux.engr.uark.edu dammit!!!!
Blech. Signatures.
Yes, Red Hat should have done a better job at clearing out the bugs from the 7.0 distro before they released it but the fact of the matter is is that the open source community thrives on the "Release early, Release often" philosophy. They deserve our ire if they are not able to respond to the bugs and get us a clean 7.1 sometime soon but not for putting together a whole new version of their distro and the bugs that come with that.
As for people who slapped 7.0 on production servers before giving the new version a few weeks to season or be tested, you get what you deserve. Now everyone do your part and beat on your favorite distros releases right after they are released and at very least submit bug reports and at very worse offer a patch. It's the community effort that makes us strong.
Bashing doesn't help. Bug fixing does. How do you (as a net admin) fix 65000 bugs? Not to forget one thing - bugs come not only from THE FIRM, but from other apps as well... 2500/65000=3.84615384615384615384615384615e-2
A good damn ratio. xxx$/0$ = ? Oooops, How do you spell infinity?
At least you can fix RH7.0's bugs - you can't do that until the next 2000 service pack comes.
Spooky of the CyBurial Squad
One tenth of the development effort generaly means one tenth of the actual development which usualy means a heck of alot easier to avoid bugs.
;)
Think about it - if your development is x10, then shouldn't your bugs be at least x4 of who you are comparing yourself to?
RedHat improves over time and gets out regular releases. hell run down a list of *other* compliments given to Microsoft and see how many apply
The problem with your kernel is GCC version 96, use KGCC and it should work. Or you can use the 2.4.0test kernels they compile normally.....
The HWSBoss guide to avoiding bugs stay clear from these
1)Redhat *.0
2)Microsoft(r) post 1992
3)Any thing that claims to be bugless
Do use:
1)Redhat *.1
2)MSDos(r)(the only thing old bill did that was good?!?!?!?)
3)Find startup Linux and help them make a bugless Distro! eg hws.4t.com
David ERIC V Beckford ^ from the labs of MOS unLimiTeD and ECSL
Deleting all your files randomly is useful, it is part of our new MoreFreeSpace technology. :)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
If you're a programmer, you'd welcome some of the things they fixed from NT4.
So I am doing a little statistics on this open software
(none of these is actually exploitable.)
Still I believe that it is entirely possible that RH7 has 2500 bugs. But please be honest, what large software doesn't have bugs.
If the bug tracking system is however closed to the public ( SuSE's e.g is only open to paying business partners) I'd be scared.
Last point: Red Hat does a lot of "base research" pushing Linux to new areas (like making applications ready for gcc 3.0.0) as opposed to others that only melt the newest packages into a distro without doing to much engineering themselves.
So please be little more fair to Red Hat. And save your anger to companies like Corel that only exploit open source without giving back much.
Bug #1387 of 2500: ;)
The number 2500 is sometimes mysterously converted to 19 on web submissions.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
http://www.linuxnewbie.org
and
http://www.bugzilla.redhat.com
are probably what you're looking for.
--
Does this merit a snide slashdot headline with a smirky little *grin*? Hell no, I like Debian. It's just unfortunate that our heros at slashdot don't have the ability to keep this kind of stuff in perspective. They seem more interesting in fanning the flames of the distro-wars.
Show me your karma first. How am I to know whether you're a true alpha male?
Heh. I'm capped at 50 -- can we talk?
Just what we need .. more fodder for the script kiddies.
Try 250 and climbing.
.before you post something that include a statistic
Seriously guys, at least check your numbers
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Slackware is rock-solid distribution. Tired of Red Hat (NASDAQ:RHAT)? Try Slack.
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Don't you get it you pathetic zealous moron fucking idiot? There never was and never will be 65,000 bugs in W2K? the initial story was wrong, that number is wrong, the stories number was wrong and everything about it was bullshit. But what isn't bullshit is that the RedHat 7 distribution has 2500+ confirmed bugs in it -- doesn't matter if it's in the base or not - it's what you get when you get the whole package. Does anyone count IE bugs seperate from W2K Bugs? IIS bugs seperate from W2k? No - so why give RH any such luxury - oh forgot, yer a zealot, Linux is perfect. What is it with "all those people?" Well, they're right. Slashdot *IS* always forgiving of Linux and harsh on MS. Always. Period.
For what it's worth, Mandrake 7.2beta3 is definitely more stable than RH 7.0. Sure, I've found a couple annoying bugs, namely with the way MDK implemented the KDE 1.94 beta (screensaver doesn't work, but I don't use it anyway).
I used to be a big RH fan, but this one swung me over to the Mandrake camp in a big way.
ChodaBoy
- The preceding statement is the product of a deranged mind and the sole property of the voices in my head.
The difference between Redhat's bugs and Windows 2000 bugs, apart from the difference of a factor of about 250, is that Redhat's bugs are bugs reported by USERS, AFTER it was released. Windows 2000s 63000 bugs, are bugs KNOWN by the DEVELOPERS, BEFORE it was released.
So the difference is also a matter of conscience and time. Again the classic Slashdot Microsoft Astroturf cry is the NON-EXISTENT "hypocrite", and ignoring that fact that TWO wrongs do NOT make a right.
and this is new? it's based on linux...what do you expect? when you get a system where any monkey can add to the codebase, you have the workings of a time bomb. *shocking*
:)
go ahead, flame me...see if i care
---
remove SPORK.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
1. Did you ever used Unix / Linux?! I think not otherwise you wouldn't say such 'unthinkable' (to be polite!) things: 'Windows is clearly [sic] superior to Linux [...]'. FYI I worked as a Sys Admin / Developer for Unix and Windows boxes. There is no doubt in my mind that Unix / Linux is superior to Windows OS. Silviu
silviu
And of those, how many are RedHat's fault as opposed to buggy packages?
Well, all of them, of course. Redhat decided to put the packages in, they didn't just magically appear on the CD. If they put buggy packages in, they should be responsible.
Maybe there's not 2500 bug in Red Hat but the thing is Red Hat doesn't try to fix the bugs in community code. Just like any big corp, they write it off as not thier problem and most of the time doesn't do anything about it. With debian, yeah there were 10,000 bugs in tator, but I never ran across any major ones, and the Debian guys tried to fix the bugs, no matter who wrote the code.
The last version of Red Hat I used was 6.2 before I said to the hell with the start up scripts and fighting with that damn linuxconf. The bugs I would get, prevented me from doing what I wanted to do. Alot of time I ended up compiling from tar balls, and rebuild the RPM's. I'll take 10,000 debian bugs over one Red Hat bug. With debian, I know there are bugs, and they are working on fixing it. I just have to wait a week and run apt-get. With Red Hat I either have to build from tarball and roll my own RPM's or get 50 billion RPM's (or use rpm --force) to install the update, which most of the time is broken anyways.
I'll stick with Debian, thank you very much. As to date, I refuse to work on any Red Hat running machines. There is just to much crap to deal with that I don't have time for.
MarNuke
Just use kgcc, which is linked to the 2.2.x kernel headers, whenever you need to compile a kernel or kernel module.
RH seems to be in a transition stage right now with 2.4 and 2.2 headers. It's a pain to shuffle around for kernel/module compilation but it should be drop-in simple to fully incorporate 2.4 when it's ready... at which point the shuffling's done away with completely.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
OK, it's not really my problem. My boss called me and asked me to take a look at a machine he tried to upgrade from 6.2->7.0. I looked at it and it kept locking up when trying to mount "Other partitions". Went into init level 1 and found that basically the problem was a few files in /etc got renamed. (/etc/services was something like /etc/services.r) I just renamed them back and it worked fine.
By doing this , Redhat is putting a bad reputation on the linux community. Sure, we all know that Red Hat isn't Linux, but many people equate the two. If Red Hat would instead release something a simple as 7.0pre1, and make it obvious that the version was expected to have bugs, things would be much better. After a while, 7.0 would finally be released without the multitude of bugs. Just like with the linux kernel-release the 7.0 series, but make it clear bugs are to be expected. Otherwise public opinion of linux will take a downturn.
Colin Winters
Isn't this the strength of open source software? I reported a bug with a closed-source, commercial stats package that I use. I also posted a message to the unofficial users mailing list. One of the users replied saying he'd reported the bug three years and two versions earlier, and it still wasn't fixed. A couple of years and a couple more minor versions later its still not fixed, and there's no patch released to fix it.
I dont care how many bugs there are in Redhat 7, just as long as they are documented, logged, and fixed in errata or new releases. And they are. Check out bug 18023 already.
Baz
This is all ridiculous. Users who are using RH longer and know their history should have seen this coming.We ALL know that distro's have bugs (perhaps not as much as the current RH) but what do you expect from an OS supplied with over 1500 application packages that has to anticipate millions of different hardware configurations using a multitude of cpu's. Secondly if RH is so bad then why not switch over to SuSE orso. In the case of SuSE you get as much software for a lower price (unless you downloaded the whle stuff). Besides Linux is Linux.. and the face of distro is mostly the supplied additional software. Just use the proper GCC and you'r back in business (provided that is the problem) This is getting even more out of proportion if you realise that we are complaining about a FREE operating system and contemporary FREE software applications. Give them a break.. or help them out. But if you don't like it then DO something about it instead of complaining!
forces Taco to produce two grammatical errors in the same post!
..."
"...releases have been historically been pretty bad
"...over the years, so I the only thing..."
I use linux because the impressive intelligent computing. If Redhat 7.0 has problems. Well, Surely the company will fix them so we will have a extraordinary step forward instead of a bad distro today. We have to remember the long post loop of Windows's Service Packs, and how Microspoonge is cheating with patches the customers. Any software is perfect. But sincere behaviour of a company, and small re-engineering time is a really value added. This thing is more important than the software alone. Don't you think???????
"Sine ira et studio" Tacitus. With neither anger nor partiality.
JKH *always* says that you should never run a .0 release of FreeBSD (if you want stability, that is). It is common knowledge that a first release of anything is generally not very friendly in the defects department - try reading a Consumer Reports magazine sometime.
;)
My advice to all is either use it and don't complain or wait for the next point release. This is not to suggest that reporting bugs is complaining.
In an ideal OSS world, people would always include a patch/workaround with the bug report. Those that don't aren't using Linux for the real reason that it's cool to use Linux.
Personally, I can't wait for the recalls to start on the PT Cruisers
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
the URL's should be linux newbie and RH bugzilla
Actually, we had no problems with the i815 graphics processor. We could get it to work in previous distros, but this time around, anaconda auto-detected it.
I'm happily running RedHat 7.0 as we speak. It seems to be solid so far, with the exception of an X11 -> Console switching bug on one of the boxes.
I'm sure errata will take care of most of it in a week or two.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
Maybe a buggy release was meant to stress their new auto-update system (Redhat network!) as they release fixes...
I upgraded from RedHat 6.2 to 7.0 and my biggest
concern was whether Oracle 8.1.6 would still work.
It does!
I don't get it ... my query reports 254 bugs for the whole distro. How did you guys get 2500??? I select RedHat Linux as the product, 7.0 as the version, and select all the statuses (statisi?). Some of these are dupes, and some are resolved ... so unless I'm mistaken, it looks some people need to work on their bugzilla skills, unless I'm wrong, of course.. :)
Hi, we here at /. like to promote a segmented linux community. We do not promote the widespread use of linux (no matter what distro), just Debian.
Come on, I've said it once and I'll say it again, this is the worst site for the promotion of opensource. They only point out the bad, never the positives. Damn, a bug is a bug. all OS's have them INCLUDING DEBIAN. nothing is safe from the falability of the human mind
...is this one.
Thanks you slashcode for borking the previous link and cutting off 40 bugs.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Red Hat made a real effort to make a distribution that would be ready for the 2.4 kernel when it comes out. That's got to mean a lot of brand-spankin-new packages... devfsd, usb, new glibc & compiler... pretty ambitious... and lots of opportunities for bugs. :)
A lot of work went into this release. I was on the beta team for this release, and there were a bunch of people working on a lot of different things to get this as ready as possible. I'm still running one beta version on a laptop and another on my desktop at home, and both are working just fine with everything I do with only two exceptions:
Are there bugs? Yep. Has there ever been a bug free OS release? Nope.
Pretty damned cocky!
Yeah, Red Hat botches a lot of things in their .0 releases; then they fix them. Who else was going to do the hard work of stabilizing support for ELF, glibc, etc.? I'll agree with one thing though; perhaps they should have put that .0 on RH7. :-)
... and on and on.
:-/
One minute everyone is complaining that some distro is shipping an old version (that had survived much QA), and the next minute they are complaining that a new version is broken. Look folks, there is a lot of code out there, written by a far-flung assortment of people who have differing opinions of release-quality. If you are using a package, the only important opinion is your own.
I hate tracking down problems as much as the next guy, but I don't expect an error-free distribution from Red Hat (or anyone else) any more than I expect Linus to ensure that every kernel driver is functioning properly. What I do want (and almost always receive in the free software world) is a constructive dialogue when there is a problem.
Companies like Sun like to talk about customer "service", but they have only fixed one of the dozens of bugs that I have identified and reported over the years in anything close to a timely fashion (1 year!). Broken SCSI (Adaptec) and Ethernet (3c905) drivers, sh (core dumps), sort (wrong order), join (wrong results), curses (row/columns > 127 ?!?),
Ah hell, just use the GNU stuff; it may not be POSIX.2, but at least it gives correct results.
RedHat 7.0 is NOT out on CD yet, as far as I have seen, so maybe they started wisening up.
The day you have half the driver support, half the functionality of the API, and anything close to a GUI besides that piece of shit XFree86, then you can talk about a complex OS. Look at QNX. That's a frickin OS. Don't compare your OS to Windows when it's apples to oranges. Another clueless Windows astroturfer. Perhaps the Windows API has a bit more functionality than the Linux API, BUT I DOUBT IT. Perhaps the GUI is a but more polished, but we have a dozen to choose from, or none at all if we don't want one. But when Windows is just finishing off, a Linux distro is just getting warmed up - 30+ programming languages - any type of server capability you can imagine, THE FULL SOURCE CODE, tools for any imaginable task related to computers you might dream of ALL PART OF THE DISTROBUTION. The functionality of something like RedHat 7.0 is immeasurably greater than any version of Windows yet dreamt of. AND THE BUGS GET FIXED unlike those in Windows.
oops, my bad...
I decided to install it on my laptop, and I was shocked to find out that it requires 1.5GB!! for the install I normally do (SQL, WWW, NFS, SMB, multimedia, etc), while in version 6.2 that same install took 750MB (Still a lot, but with what I'm installing not too bad).
No one submits bug reports. Ever bug I encounter in redhat is fixed, because I submit bug reports (to the author, or to redhat). I'm only a user of opensource software, the least I can do is report problems.
For all this talk about redhat being buggy, I have heard of only two true bugs, other then hardware incompatabilities.
I rather have redhat pushing forward, then debain which is not doing any more security fixes for their old version less then five months of their new one?!?
But I will not post inflamatory remarks like debian leaves their users constantly stranded just because I prefer a different distro.
then a guy from redhat replied ...
Enjoy
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
200 bugs in a week? What were the beta testers doing during the lead up to this release?
:)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's their job to report these sort of issues. Sure, you'll never get the full range of weird hardware during a test cycle, but it looks like either the testers weren't reporting the bugs (which happens a lot), or Redhat didn't bother to fix them (which I sort of doubt).
I think I'll still buy it though.
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
It's, in my experience, much less reliable than NT (which isn't very reliable to start).
I've, so far, been highly disappointed by 2K.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
OldHat never learned from their buggy past, and now OldHat Linux 7.0 has more bugs than a bait store.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I have a woody.
I need a sig.
...but some of them are closed already!
I've gone from Red Hat 6.2 to 6.9.5 to 7.0. I submitted four or five bug reports in 6.9.5; one was a "already fixed in Rawhide" situation, two others got fixes a few days later, one has a fix coming when they put together a glibc-devel errata. XFree86 4.0.1 still consumes an ungodly amount of memory on my machine, but compared to the bugs in the first releases of Red Hat 5.0 and 6.0 (which I avoided until a few weeks of errata issues had gone by), I've been quite impressed. So far I've seen Red Hat 7.0 on 2 computers, and it's been good, 2 for 2. Your particular system may vary, of course. I'd advise waiting a month before upgrading all your corporate workstations, and waiting for 7.1 before touching any important servers... but if you're not in that kind of situation, come on in, the water's fine.
By contrast, I've seen significantly more problems with Mandrake 7.1, which was frighteningly down towards the Windows end of the quality-o-meter. That was a big let down, since Mandrake 7.0 had given our LUG such a smooth installfest last year. At least with Red Hat 5 and 6, the progression from "buggy" to "rock-solid" was steadily upward.
get it to install! I keep getting a signal 11 on the install script!
Dammit How the hell did he get into my puter?
But it shouldn't have been too hard to expand their distribution... they stole all their packages from Mandrake. :)
and to beat that... the story itself was inflammatory, and blatently inacurate... grounds for a libel suit... anyway... who cares about the whiny masses... the beauty of open source is that Red Hat has to give you the code. If they dislike it that much, A: why did they bother downloading or buying it in the first place without bothering to wait on any reviews, bugreports, etc; B: if they think they can create adn release a distro this big, then why the fick dont they stop bitching and do it. Nothing pisses me off more than a bunch of bitchy children who can do nothing more than fuss, instead of doing it themselves or trying to make it better.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
In many ways, I think that the .0 releases are rather akin to Microsoft's 'public beta' releases (but with fewer bugs than M$'s final releases). There probably wouldn't be much of an issue to make of it if RH wasn't stamping out disks and selling them as a commercial distributions.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I've been using Redhat 7 for a few days now. I haven't had any significant problems. Granted I don't have pretty standard and not very new hardware (K6-2, Millenium II...). Installation was a breeze, even cleaner then 6.2.
.0 release, but also consider that RH decided to include a lot of new stuff too, like Xfree86 4.0, new gcc, etc.
.0 release, but oh well. It works fine on my system tho, so I can't complain too much.
However, there have been a few minor glitches that I wonder about. I tried using LinuxConf to set my static IP address, and it wouldn't find the DNS servers (but incoming traffic was fine). Finally I went back to the old Control Panel and used Network config and it worked fine.
I think bugs are to be expected by now in a
I had high hopes that maybe RH would break the trend and not have a buggy
Still the network configuration problem and a few other oddities definitely are starting to make me consider trying something else, like debian perhaps.
Spyky
Linuxnewbie.org addresses this: "Update: Apparently there may not have been as many bugs as led to believe. RH 7 has in teh neighborhood of 250 NEW bugs and 2000 were fixed during the BETA." In looking at this, I assume that the 149 bugs you mention are remaining and that 101 other bugs have been fixed.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Now, lets see: 2,500 reported bugs for a full distro (including many apps) VS 65,000 for the Base OS (most apps $extra)
So, just who's full of "Creepy crawly slimey, icky stickey, ucky yucky BUGS ?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
ESR wisely stated that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I'm sure that many of the people around here have read this, and possibly a disjoint set of people believe it, but I feel it is good to keep harping on that point. As the popularity of linux (any and all distros) increases, the number of reported bugs grows in proportion. This is the theory behind bughunts when groups such as mozilla want people to use their beta software-to find the bugs.
This is open source. Help fix bugs. Stop bitching.
Must be tied into that article about drugs and IT... Red Hat's beta testers must've been on some kind bud to miss all these bugs... Asleep at the wheel!
in one of our new mail servers today! We send out a few hundred thousand e-mails every week (not spam!).
As of 10:16PM EST, everything looks pretty good. Got to the co-location facility early this morning, backed up my RH 6.2 server and installed 7.0 from scratch.
Everything went pretty well and quickly on the dual pentium III 600 system. In fact, everything "seems" faster.
Qmail installed and custom compiled without a hitch as well. 2 Hours later we were FTP'ing job over there.
I guess for desktop and development work there will be problems, but for mundane things like mail servers, I'm happy.
Newsfollow.com
I know Windows2000 isn't exactly the "quality bar" that anybody should ever be trying to measure themselves against, but lets not forget that when it was released it had 65000 known bugs - and that's just for OS - a typical Linux distro has hundreds of applications as well.
funny. everyone here is complaining about how redhat's .0 releases are bad. i personally always thought the .1 releases were the most problematic... .1 release should be.
/tmp) and has never been the same since. i won't reinstall mandrake 7.1 because i'm too sick of the hassle of installing X4.0 without corrupting my RPM database (quite a trick), plus now that i live off campus, i would have to download the whole of X 4.0 and helix-gnome over a modem connection.... <sigh
i wasn't around for rh4.1 (first used 4.2 and first installed 5.0) 5.1 was a rough one, what with glibc and two compilers. ("i have a great idea. let's make gcc the default c compiler, and egcs the default c++ compiler!!" somebody should have thought of kgcc back then...) granted there were some major changes that happened between 5.0 and 5.1 that made it a bit more problematic than your average
6.1 was so bad i dithed redhat for mandrake. 6.2 was the only version of redhat that i never installed on my box since 4.2. kind of a shame actually, because from what i've heard it's one of their best. but i'm happy with mandrake.
i think i will end up installing rh7 though. my box got kinda screwey after the root partition filled up with files somehow (you would not believe the crazyness that ensues when you can not create files in
anyway, i looked at these bugs, and most of them are pretty much stupid ("initial desktop crazyness"??? when has redhat's initial/default desktop not been crazy?) other than issues with the installer (which was a big part of why i ditched redhat for 6.1) which i guess i'll just have to try my luck at, i don't think any of them would even affect me.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
If you look now, the number is more like 330 bugs.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Indeed. While I'll admit, I haven't tried out RH7, I'm familiar with RH6.
A little too familiar.
When I first tried out Linux a few months ago, I'd been told that it was stable and easy to get running. It would install as easily as Windows 95, it would never crash, and I figured with my previous UNIX user experience, it'd be no big deal. I've never been scared by a shell prompt.
I was given a copy of RH6 by a friend. Now, you'll note, I'm a little more savvy than the balding accountant grabbing the impulse-buy at Fry's. I knew 6.0 wouldn't be as stable as the then-current 6.1, but I also didn't have a CD burner at the time, nor did I have high-speed Internet access with which to download RH6.1.
I'm glad it was Red Hat. Its apparent popularity makes it easy to find information and support; it seems every Linux usr knows RH. And since this machine was my first root prompt, it was nice to have friendly and helpful people to help me out through the newsgroups and stuff.
But I can't believe the absolute crap I went through making RH6 work! The worst part of it had to be getting two Allied Telesyn AT-1500 ISA cards to work in the same machine. I did everything that the How-tos told me to do; everything worked great when I tossed a HD with Windows onto the system. Nothing worked under RH6. I finally gave up and got two PCI adapters which worked first shot.
Interestingly enough, when I upgraded that machine to RH6.2, I tossed in my old Allied Telesyns. They worked instantly.
How about having PCMCIA slot services crash your VESA bus 486 desktop (even though the installer specifically asked if you wanted PCMCIA services installed, and you said NO)? How about the damned LILO >1,024 cylinder bug? How about an installer that figures out that you've got a monochrome VGA monitor and accordingly changes the color scheme such that the text and the background are the same color?
I recognize that Red Hat has to please investors. But all the Linux advocacy in the world isn't going to help users, less persistent than I am, who pick up Linux, give it a whirl, and discover that it's as flaky as a Microsoft product. (Remember, a new user knows only "Linux", and probably won't much grasp the concept of the different distributions.)
While I remain satisfied with their product (from the perspective of a relatively new Linux user who still needs spoon-feeding occasionally), Red Hat simply *has* to be more careful.
If 7.0 sucks as badly as Hedwig, they could alienate a lot of people and literally undermine the whole Linux community.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I've been searching the bugzilla database, and there doesn't seem to be 2500 bugs, but 250. Of them, many are closed or duplicate. That make about 100 bugs.
/var/log/message AND /var/log/crond.log). Ie: harmless
Many install bugs, most of them due to *bad* CDs (and not yet closed)
Many minor bugs (kind of log of crond is redirected to
Few missing drivers bugs (eata seems a major one, here)
Few non-distro related bugs (ie: gnome bugs, etc, etc)
Some related to the upgrade of gcc, which now refuses to compile some bad c++ code.
Sure, there are problem, there are people that cannot install, but nothing huge.
Btw, the guy that is linked from the slashdot story appear on several bug reports doing some finger-pointing. Strange, isnt'it ?
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Not exactly.
:-)
They _should_ be shipping XFree 4.0.1 by now, so it should be slightly stable.
However, last I heard kernel 2.4.0 hadn't actually been released -- only 2.4.0-pre9. Now, THAT takes guts to install
It's a definite improvement over pre-8, though, which for me spontaneously rebooted after 10 minutes of Internet access.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Kernel 2.4.0-test9-pre9.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Doesn't redhat have beta testers? Oh wait I forgot thats you. Thats a good buesiness strategy, have all your paying customers be involuntary guinea pigs.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
You can download Redhat, or better yet Debian. ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Let me rephrase the original poster's (perfectly reasonable) comment:
Bullshit. You can't release an operating system of that size and scope with only one bug visible "in practice."
Nitpicking sucks. Don't do it.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Wow... what's this? Another clueless story on Red Hat Linux where Debian fans can say something not very insightful and get scored up? Yahoo.
Take a look at those bugs - if you remove duplicates, notabug et., you cut the number in half. Remove requests for enhancements, and you've lowered the number even more. Look at the rest(many of which are "I would like it to be this way, not that way"), think of the fact that Red Hat Linux gets by far the most beating of any distribution and it doesn't look at all bad.
Our testing programs for this release was more extensive than ever, and I think this release is very good.
Funny how no one said that during the "65,000 bugs in W2K" bullshit spammed around here February. This is not suprising either.
I don't know who pulled the number 2500 out of thin air, but a query of bugzilla as of 9:25pm on 10/02 shows "only" 149 bugs, and given the number of those that are NEW, there are probably less than 100 actual bugs. And of those, how many are RedHat's fault as opposed to buggy packages?
If someone pulled that number out of bugzilla, they must not have known how to use it. If not, then they just pulled the number out of thin air.
I'm not saying that 149 possible bugs is "good", but it is more in line with what you might expect a week after a major release.
I tried building something with INTI in it - and the whole include tree is scuppered.
ODBC driver doesn't appear to work...
I KNEW gcc was going to be a problem, but did it anyway.
There NEEDS to be some kind of damage control saying "If you're using 7.0 do X,Y,Z"
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix