A Fedora User For the Long Haul

Posted Oct 26, 2006 7:45 UTC (Thu) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328)
In reply to: An empty legacy by kh
Parent article: An empty legacy

I am still installing Fedora everywhere I go. I reluctantly switched to RedHat from Slackware a looong time ago (early to mid-90s) when I needed a version to run on a DEC Alpha and couldn't be bothered to simultaneously manage two different distributions on my Alpha versus my PC. Despite many frustrations with the way they try to make Linux behave like Windows, I've grown to appreciate the hard work they do too. And many of the faults actually lie in upstream sources, so I can only blame Fedora for including them...

I never believed in "upgrade" of Linux systems, but rather accepted a periodic reinstall while migrating my home directory data. However, with Fedora I recently discovered, during a business trip, my wife's laptop was running a very stale FC3 and I remotely upgraded it via yum FC3->FC4->FC5 to become fully up to date. (I did this so we could try using ekiga to chat internationally.)

It worked like a charm, right up until it ran out of disk space. However, even then I was able to recover it, clear some space, and finish the upgrade. Note to self: yum upgrade at one point has the old system, all the new downloaded packages, and potentially some of the new package files installed too, it would seem. Needs lots of disk space. I only had to manually search for some really old packages that were orphaned when yum fell over in the middle of a "delete and install" transaction. It is funny how they use the word transaction here...

So, I think it is reasonable to say a real "legacy" strategy for Fedora users is to wait until updates are tapped out in an old distribution, and then upgrade the system to the newer release+updates. By this time, the new release should have most of its bugs patched in the updates stream too. For people who really cannot take this risk of modernity, I agree they probably ought to be running a more conservative distribution like CentOS.

Ironically, the only real problem I've had recently was a bizarre heisenbug on a regular FC5 laptop (not one that had followed such a convoluted upgrade path). With the latest updates a few weeks ago, it began having oom-killer storms in the night correlated with the daily cron jobs. I could not resolve this, and eventually reinstalled from scratch. Problem disappeared. Searching the web gave few hints, and it seems people who encounter this have been using all different distributions and not just Fedora! Search hits are always to someone reporting the issue, getting no resolution, and solving it via frustrated reinstall.

A Fedora User For the Long Haul

Posted Oct 26, 2006 21:40 UTC (Thu) by at2000 (guest, #20920) [Link] (2 responses)

I sort of dislike this altitude of the RedHat camp. My oldest debian/ubuntu linux was installed around 6 years ago and has survived for 6 upgrades now (potato -> woody -> sarge -> hoary -> breezy -> dapper -> edgy). Other systems are also upgraded twice or so like this. To me, upgrades never fail, and more importantly, it has near zero downtime.

A Fedora User For the Long Haul

Posted Oct 27, 2006 3:48 UTC (Fri) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328) [Link]

Which attitude is that? I am saying the upgrade DID work, and would have had near zero downtime if I hadn't tried to do it to a system that was 98% full when I started.

This was a completely remote, network based upgrade by pointing yum at a mirror site, installing the new fedora-release package, running "yum upgrade", and then rebooting with the new kernel at the end. I did this via ssh... My extra grief was clearing some space and running "yum upgrade" again in the middle, following by a search through all packages sorted by install time to find a few orphans to delete.

My attitude about not trusting upgrades predates RedHat, and comes from my experience with Slackware, SLS, and older non-Linux environments...

Also, the problem with the oom-killer storms was reported also by Ubuntu and Debian users when I did a web search. It seems to be a very erratic bug, not tied to any particular distribution or kernel version.

Ubuntu is not free from troubles either

Posted Oct 29, 2006 14:50 UTC (Sun) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link]

I am disappointed that some people, like you, feel the need to polarize the community. All distributions have problems with supporting seamless upgrades between releases. It may have worked in your case, but that doesn't mean that it works for everybody. (Just like if it breaks for one person it doesn't fail for all users).

The irony is that on slashdot the following article appeared:

Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare"
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/06/10/28/239258.shtml

So it's not an isolated problem with Fedora. Fact is that it is easy to do reinstallations to test a products consistency, but it is much harder to test upgrades and reiterate over the same upgrade (for all the different systems that exist). Once a system is upgraded (with all its problems) you loose the original system to debug and fix it.

An Enterprise Linux distribution is what you need if you want to be free of upgrade problems. Long support and non-disruptive changes is what 99.99% of the people need. Go with CentOS or Ubuntu LTS instead.

Stop polarizing the community and take a step back. Red Hat is improving Ubuntu indirectly, and vice versa. Killing diversity is killing the community.