I've installed AIR on two machines, a PII and my Acer laptop. Both were upgrades of Mandrake 6.1, itself an upgrade of RH6.0 I still have a few stray problems, but overall it went very smooth and most systems appear to be working. My initial results: 1) on both machines, /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers was deleted (I chose to preserve old settings) and /etc/http/conf/httpd.conf was bumped (it should install the new one as .rpmnew not bump the old config and render the server out of action until the files are repaired) --- there is a general problem of packages installing new, default config files instead of recognizing the existing config files as important and adding the new conf files with .rpmnew extensions Perhaps a solution is to follow the installation with a program to find all .rpmorig or .rpmnew (and mkdorig) files under /etc/ and to offer a split-screen editor or some other means to allow the sysadmin to resolve any conflicts _before_ the system is rebooted into an unusable or incomplete state. 2) The Acer laptop has trouble with the kernel apm.c --- the official sources need to be patched to mask ... + apm_bios_entry.offset = apm_bios_info.offset & 0xffff; As a result, while the CD boots and installs ok, the installed system has APM enabled and will fail to boot. (btw, bravo to the kind soul who modified the install to preserve our old LILO settings) The Acer is not the only laptop with this problem, so APM should not be included by default in the installed kernel. I don't know if this patch is safe to apply in non-broken APM implementations. 3) ESSSolo1 sound card support on the laptop fails to install correctly --- I am still tracking down what has gone wrong. The module appears to install itself (according to kernel messages) but there is no output and applications trigger messages about missing sound-slot-0-0 definitions. 4) Good news: The install correctly identified my 2nd partition as the /boot partition to be mounted _after_ partition 3 (my root) --- 6.1 and RH both fail to do this correctly 5) It did not happen on the laptop, but on the desktop, all my prior Linux kernel images were incorrectly set in lilo.conf to a partition of "1" instead of "/dev/hda3" ... this may be related to the boot partition being p2. As a result, because there is no value checking on the LILO edit dialog, the install gleefully let me run LILO on invalid data causing the LILO install stage to fail (with no report on the reason for the failure). A simple value check in that dialog box would prevent this problem. 6) We may want to explain the difference between LILO and CHoS on the installation screen, especially if CHoS really does solve the 1024 cylinder problem. >From a useability point of view, the install process was beautiful, but it could still do with some humanizing to let the unwary know what all the cryptic package names might mean. For example, on the list of cryptopgraphic software packages, there is not enough information to decide between similarly named packages and no hint of whether it is safe to include only some of them. It is also not clear from the screen that you can still use ALT-F2 to get to a terminal screen. Overall, though, I'd have to say that AIR has worked just fine and outside of the sound problem on the laptop, it was smoother than any prior upgrade (which does not say a lot, really) --- although it required some expert tech knowledge to effect the upgrade, I was able to upgrade and reboot without having to resort to really low level things like correcting the mount table or recompiling the kernel (because it saved my old one) -- Gary Lawrence Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> TeleDynamics Communications Inc Business Telecom Services : Internet Consulting : http://www.teledyn.com Linux/GNU Education Group: http://www.egroups.com/group/linux-education/ "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)
