On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 01:13:29PM -0600, Sean Armstrong wrote:
-> Now that I've had some time to cool down, let me start by apologizing to
-> those diehard Mandrake people that couldn't read past the Subject before
-> getting offended and defensive of their distribution.
Gee, Sean, you are the soul of tact here. In the same sentence you 1)
offer an apology, and 2) insult the people to whom you are trying to
apologize. Want a job as a PR flack for Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign?
-> Now, let me try to
-> re-explain this problem one more time so there is no confusion:
-> I have two computers, one is an old DELL P133Mhz with an old TEAC cdrom. The
-> other is another old computer with an AMD K-5 133mhz chip and a brand
-> spanking new 50x cdrom. Two problems began with the beta release of 7.0 the
-> release of air and now the release of 7.02. First problem is the cdrom. All
-> three versions of 7.0 will not autoboot or initialize on the old TEAC Cdrom.
-> They will however do this on the 50X cdrom no problemo. The bug in this
-> issue is that the 6.0 and 6.1 versions had NO problem on either cdrom. I
-> understand that Mandrake changed installers from the old Redhat installer to
-> the fancy new GUI installer. They did not, however carry over any code for
-> the older ATAPI cdroms.
On what do you base this last sentence? Unless you can show this, your
arguement fails. Since most CD-ROM drivers are part of the Linux disty and
are not provided by the packager, this suggests that all recent disties
should be subject to the same problem, if indeed it is a problem.
-> So, their new installer does not initialize on some
-> older CDROMS. My CDROM works fine because I went and reinstalled Mandrake
-> 6.1 with no problems. Granted I'm not the most prolific programmer in the
-> world, but I've installed every distribution of Linux I could find on this
-> computer. The only other one that gave me any problems was the Corell dist.
-> (Which really sucks) The second problem is that I couldn't get the graphical
-> installer to recognize my mouse automatically on the AMD computer. No
-> problem I was still able to install with my keyboard, but I couldn't choose
-> what packages to install. I fixed this after finishing installation.
->
-> These were my two problems. After running into this problem 3 time with all
-> three 7.0 dists. and never received any fruitful help, only workaround
-> advice that was more trouble than it was worth. Or, told I didn't know what
-> I was doing and should read the documentation again because there wasn't any
-> bug when there obviously was. I finnally let my frustration get the best of
-> me and vented a little in hopes of making others think about the problem a
-> little instead of telling me how great their wonderful brand spanking new
-> Mandrake 7.02 works on all of THEIR computers. (This irritated me even more,
-> even though I probably deserved it because most people think these kinds of
-> letters are flame mail only)
-> The point is, and I apologize to those of you who made it this far, is that
-> in the competitive markets of OS's that is becoming more competitive as
-> Windblozes loses it's media control, Mandrake rushed this product out a
-> little fast and di NOT fix all of the REPORTED bugs in Oxygen. (Believe me,
-> I reported these bugs to them the moment O2 was released) And the CDROM and
-> Mouse issue are bugs because they do not crop up in earlier versions of
-> Mandrake. Maybe that can't fix all the bugs, but they should fix the
-> reported bugs or document a decent workaround until they can fix it before
-> releasing a product labelled as stable. This is good business sense if you
-> don't want to piss of your customers. And this is a customer oriented market
-> whether their product is free or not. That, you'll get what we give you
-> because it's free and love it attitude is just as bad as the we control the
-> market attitude of the giant Windsucks.
Sean, some alternative explanations of the problem:
1) It is the older CD-ROM drive which is at fault. I've had that happen
with CDs made at Microsoft using Windows NT, and trying to install to
Windows NT. So I don't think a bad Linux driver could explain my problem
there. This may be because a) the older CD-ROM drive is worn, delivering
marginal performance, or possibly because b) the older drive was
originally built to sloppier tolerances, which would also deliver marginal
performance.
2) A marginal CR-ROM. It works on the newer drive because the newer one is
more forgiving of errors.
3) Mandrake used a different CD-ROM burner for this CD than they did for
the older ones. This might also result in the problem you are seeing.
If #s 2 or 3 is the problem, perhaps Mandrake will consider replacing the
CD-ROM. You will have to take that up with them.
Perhaps you can disprove these three conjectures?
I'm getting tired of reading your whining. You have a problem. You have a
workaround: use the newer drive. Now please shut up and let the list get
back to its usual business: helping people who are willing to do something
themselves to solve their problems.
--
-- C^2
No windows were crashed in the making of this email.
Looking for fine software and/or web pages?
http://w3.trib.com/~ccurley
