Hello. On Sat 2002-12-07 at 17:17:19 +1100, Stephen Kuhn wrote: > On Sat, 2002-12-07 at 16:00, Mark Weaver wrote: [...] > AND, dig this - those installations are going on the SAME machine - > nothing changed. Nothing. Nada. > > The first five times I installed MDK on this workstation, I changed some > things here and there just so that I could get the feel of the install. > After that, though, the installations were "by the book" as I wanted > them - and as stated, two of the five installations would NOT hold the > settings properly.
That sounds like a hardware problem. Programs are deterministic
(except if randomness is explicitly implemented), i.e. given the same
inputs, you will get the same execution path and the same output.
If the output changes (your installation sometimes has problems and
sometimes not), the input (in the widest sense) must have changed.
Maybe the machine changed them indirectly, e.g. because the RAM is
faulty. Maybe you gave different inputs, by changing the
configuration, but I doubt that.
There is one option left: Changing inputs due to operations that
depend on timing, but usually that is accounted for in the programs. I
have installed Mandrake 9.0 about 10 times and never observed any
changes that looked abitrary or randomly.
My experience is, that such random changes are most often caused by
hardware problems. Even if they are only observed with one OS. That
simply means, that it does something different, so that it triggers
that behaviour. (I even had that with faulty RAM. X under Debian 2.2
was unstable, but Microsoft Windows 98 run fine, a memtest showed
the RAM was broken - only with certain storage patterns).
> So, instead of all of us that know something about something throwing
> blame back at those less experienced, there are some things that have to
> be realized - there ARE problems with the MDK 9 distro and they HAVE to
> be fixed.
The best way to get them fixed is to find a reliable way to reproduce
them and post the recipe.
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Btw, would you please trim that down when posting to the list. Thanks.
HTH,
Benjamin.
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