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. 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. 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.
> Thank You,
> SA
> ______________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
Good post, Sean. That brings it a little more together. The fact that your
CDs will not autoboot on the TEAC clarifies some things.
This is one of those cases where Decisions are made, seemingly small at the
time, but which could loom ominous. Obviously, Mandrakesoft felt the available
time was better spent elsewhere on other bugs, and did not consider the matter
"serious" whereas Sean obviously had a differing point of view.
Well, Sean, I have a Panasonic CD which works off a sound card with a 34 pin
cable at 2X. It won't boot or initialize RH 5.1 or anything more recent.
I have not tried it with RH 5.0 because I don't have 5.0. It worked fine on
installing Debian in 1995 or 1996. I think I would find your position
untenable if I tried to use my old CD on my system (almost ready for a glass
case) as the example.
OTOH, I think you deserved more courtesy than you received on the list when you
were bringing forth the issue. Still, even I, who try really hard to read
50-80 emails a day and stay abreast of the threads, gave you some advice which
I had found useful in some other situations, but would have been in your
situation rather useless. That is the way of things because this media and
method seem to have no more capability than that.
Glad to see you have cooled down. Now shall we ponder a constructive method of
improving the quality assurance? I don't think any classical inspection scheme
is really much more than a broken system to begin with, and probably
inapplicable given the open shop environment we deal with. Would you be
willing to be part of a team to propose a method of building in better quality
(not fixing what's broke but building it right the first time) if we users
could get someone at Mandrakesoft to agree to test the resulting proposed
system?
Civileme
