Benjamin Franz wrote: >>> I disagree with this statement entirely. Fedora Core is not a >>> stable release. >> >> What exactly does that mean? >> >> In my experience, not only is Fedora stable, >> but so is every Linux distribution I have tried in recent years, >> as also are all recent versions of Windows - >> assuming that by "stable" you mean >> you do not get the "blue screen of death" or equivalent. > > You mean like the recent update to Xorg that rendered many machines > completely borken unless you are enough of a system expert to manage a > forced boot to run level 3, locating the old Xorg packages in the yum > cache and manually force a '--oldpackage' install with rpm from the > command line? I guess it is just a matter of terminology, but I would not use the word "unstable" to describe this. I would just say "the latest version of X does not work on my machine". Incidentally, couldn't you get to a text console with Ctrl-Alt-F1? If so, I would hardly say one needed to be a system expert - just to have read one or two basic documents. I have a fairly esoteric collection of computers, and didn't find FC-4 any more or less of a problem than any of the RedHat or Slackware distributions I've tried. In fact, FC-4 is the _first_ distribution for which X worked "out of the box" on my Sony C1VFK Picturebook since Xorg started. (I've always had to compile X with a patch for this machine, as has everyone else with a Picturebook. Apparently the patch has now been included by Xorg.) To me, a machine is "unstable" if it crashes fairly frequently for no obvious reason. As I said, I haven't come across an unstable version of Linux (or Windows) for several years. I wouldn't use the word "unstable" if a distribution simply did not work on a particular machine. In my experience, one is likely to meet problems with every new distribution; I haven't found FC-[1234] any different in this respect from the many versions of RH that I ran through. I would say that "yum" has been an extremely useful tool, which has enormously simplified life - far better than the old Redhat update (or was it up2date?). -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
