[clug] Failed OS updates - and a request

[Felix Karpfen]

Basil Chupin wrote:
> I am curious about this (because I am using SuSE). What do you mean by 
> "You do not know what you want; _we do_"; what exactly don't they allow 
> you to do and therefore force you to accept?

To use a quote from "Alice in Wonderland" (my favourite book) - "It is a
long and sorry tail".

1) I crashed during the first RH install because there was no option to
   use "fdisk" for partitioning my HD and leave untouched the partitions 
   that contained /usr/local and /home (using fdisk was an option in 
   RH 7.1).

2) When using the HD partitioner supplied by RH 9.0, it: 

a) refused to accept a partition size of 25 Mb for /boot; it insisted
   that the minimum partition size be 100 Mb.  Consequently, I had to
   abandon my plan to retain the partitions that contained my personal
   files and the programs that I had installed from source codes.
   
b) it then refused to accept the revised partition structure that I
   suggested; instead it rearranged my suggested sizes to arrive at an 
   optimum use of the designated space.  Having bitten the bullet on a), 
   this caused no additional heartaches.

3) The real killer is in the "release notes" to the RH install. These
   describe the changes in RH 9.0 and foreshadow the shape of things
   to come.  Assuming that I have understood these notes correctly, all
   my personally installed software (which includes my preferred windows 
   manager - fvwm2) will still work under RH 9.0 but may cease to work
   when the current innovations (e.g. renaming font files descriptions) 
   are fully operational.  Given my geriatric amateur status, I may have 
   misunderstood the implications of that rename.  But I am not prepared
   to take the chance.  I refuse to be told that I have to use either
   KDE or Gnome if I want to use XWindows.

There are many other identified annoyances in RH 9.0 that I could
probably have overcome sooner or later; but - with the current
growth-rate of KDE - my 200Mh computer was heading for the scrapheap.

Felix Karpfen 

PS: In case anyone is interested, the Mandrake Installer did not even
    have the decency to say when it did not accept my suggestions. It
    just went ahead and did what it knows how to do.  I ended up
    overwriting a Linux partition on my 2nd HD - and I had explicitly
    excluded that HD from the requested Mandrake reformat and carefully
    selected the packages that I wanted Mandrake to install.

-- 
Felix Karpfen
felixk at webone.com.au
Public Key 72FDF9DF (DH/DSA)