Re: RH 6.0 on alpha stability?

[Alvin Starr <alvin iplink net>]

On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Michal Jaegermann wrote:

> Wes Bauske wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > What I've seen:
> > 
> > 1. Gnome is broken.
> > 2. ping/traceroute were broken but are supposed to be fixed now.
> > 3. The lp package is broken. Haven't looked for a fix.
> > 4. Others have had trouble with xfs but it works for me.(YMMV)
> > 5. Others have mentioned missing/broken text consoles,
> >    rxvt I think. I live with KDE's term.
> > 6. I've run into some bugs in egcs-1.1.2 and have
> >    switched to gcc-2.95.1.
> > 7. I run newer kernels than are supplied by RH6.0
> >    to pick up some kernel fixes I need.
> 
> >From the top of my head I can add right away to this list:
> 
> 8. PAM libraries are broken (try to add a password to an account
>    without one; other nasty happenings)
> 9. Ghostscript is broken
> 10. TeX, as a package, is broken (maybe related to 9).
> 11. RPM libraries are broken (causing installation failures
> in some circumstances)
> 12. All terminal programs (rxvt, xterm, kvt, gnome-terminal)
> unexpectedly crash in mysterious ways; mostly when
> cat'ing some inocuous text file to a screen.
> 13.  Some utilities (gnome-terminal is probably the most guilty
> here) open "by themselves" extra files with unprintable characters
> in their names (lucky me, with "better" names I could loose some
> of my real data).
> 14. Various networking programs sport dubious behaviour.
> 
> It is hard to believe that the above list is even close to complete.

I have been using RH for Alpha since about 4.2 and have had mixed results
at various times. I currently have one  system still running 4.2 a number
of systems running 5.1 patched up to be about 5.2 a couple of 5.2's and 2
6.0's

I have found 6.0 to be a bit flaky on the x86 systems so my expectation of
the alpha port is much lower than it might be otherwise. I have learned
that an X.0 version of RH is not the software that you want to run out and
convert all your servers to.  There were a number of major changes between
5.2 and 6.0 and sadly with a lot of new features comes a lot of new bugs.
To make thing s worse it seems that RH's Alpha support lags behind the
x86 support by about a month or so and I get the impression that RH does
not have a lot of Alpha hardware to test new systems on.



Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (416)585-9971
Interlink Connectivity        ||   fax:   (416)585-9974
alvin@iplink.net              ||