GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode [LWN.net]

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 19:11 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode by dskoll
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

It's so easy to believe the grass is greener on the other side... That if some company makes billions with their software it must be really good and immune to the goofs that the stuff we hack together ourselves suffers from.

Only... I got a nice new Lenovo T430 with Win7 pro, 64 bit. I was a good boy and I created restore media. Well done! Then I plopped the disk from my old laptop in the second bay and started dual booting.

All was well -- except that Windows 7 couldn't install the majority of its crucial system updates because it couldn't install them over locked files. But every reboot iteration helped a little there, and I got it up to date.

Then, after two weeks of heavy software development under Windows, I booted the laptop one morning to find it felt it had to check the disk. And yes, the night before I had performed a clean shutdown. And it felt it to repair stuff.

So I let it repair stuff. Turns out that the wifi and "internet time" services got damages. Zut... Let's try that restore media. Zut... It doesn't want to restore: indeed, restore silently fails. Wonderful. Still, deadlines are deadlines, so now laptop is tethered to its cable when doing Windows stuff.

The grass is not greener on the OSX side, either, where a regular OS update made my Mac Mini unbootable. Fortunately, that still came with OS dvd's, so I could reinstall, which is impossible with the Win7 partition on the T430.

Software sucks, hardware sucks, prices are doubling, pleasures are dwindling and nothing is as it should be!

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GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 13, 2012 13:04 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (3 responses)

Wow, so Windows isn't completely immune to problems when your hardware fails?

Well it's a good think Linux runs tickety-boo when your disk starts returning bad data.

(PS:
>All was well -- except that Windows 7 couldn't install the majority of its crucial system updates because it couldn't install them over locked files. But every reboot iteration helped a little there, and I got it up to date.

I imagine many people here don't have direct recent experience of Windows Update; suffice it to say that the above is a major exaggeration. Windows does indeed still have the crazy file locking semantics and has no equivalent to ksplice, so some updates will still require a reboot, but this talk of 'reboot cycles' is a tired old canard. The only Linux distribution I have recent 'desktop' experience of is Ubuntu, and that pops up 'reboot required' reminders somewhat more often than Windows does.)

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 13, 2012 13:31 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

No, my hardware didn't fail Windows failed. The disk wasn't actually broken, Windows 7 was broken.

And no, Nye, I did not lie about the windows update problems. I did not exaggerate, let alone majorly.

It was exactly as I described. On starting the laptop after unboxing, the update center informed me that it needed to install a few dozen updates, and I said Ok. Then it informed me that it needed to reboot, and I said Ok. Then it tried to apply the updates, failed, and on showing the desktop told me it had crucial updates to apply I said Ok, and it asked me to reboot, and I said Ok -- rinse and repeat until Windows was satisfied.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 15, 2012 19:24 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

I use Windows a lot and can confirm that Windows Update works like this - sometimes I will find an update fails, and can only be applied by requesting the update on a freshly booted system (sometimes in Safe Mode), and then rebooting again.

OS X (10.7 Lion) is pretty painful for me at the moment because my Macbook Air WiFi goes mad man times a day - usually turning WiFi on and off, or rebooting, or power cycling the WAP, will fix it. I resorted to installing a driver from previous OS X version just to improve the WiFi. Ultimately I think it's that OS X doesn't like working with my Asus WAP (RT-N10), which works fine with a couple of iOS devices, some Windows laptops, etc. There's a 150 page thread on the Apple forums about this WiFi issue with Lion.

Ironically enough, I got this WAP because of an iPad 3 having WiFi problems with a WRT54G running Tomato.

Macs are quite nice in some ways as a reasonably sane Unix environment that also has nice software you can buy if you want, plus a lot of open source software - but in my experience the Apple WiFi support is truly awful. I suspect Apple only tests with their own Airport WAPs.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 15, 2012 19:27 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

On 'the disk didn't fail' - I recently found Windows had 'deleted' the hal.dll file required for boot. I replace the hal.dll but it got removed again. It turned out to be that the disk was failing silently, without visible read errors in the logs - I replaced it with an SSD and it's been fine since. So in this case it was a disk failure, but on the surface it looked like a Windows failure.

If you are having unexplained file corruption, it could be a RAM error as well, of course.