Re: State of Woody?
On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Per Wigren wrote:
> How stable is woody/alpha right now?
Dunno...I'm running unstable by necessity :-)
> I tried it on my PWS about 6 months ago but it was horrible
> unstable then!
How so?
> And besides, there was no KDE2 or Mozilla.
That may still end up being the case. While we have the core KDE stuff
compiled, things like KOffice, etc, remain uncompilable. I wish woody's
freeze wasn't on top of us now or else I'd make gcc-3.0 our default
compiler (gcc 2.95.4 is broken for C++, hence mozilla and KDE wouldn't
compile properly before).
Just out of curiosity, why is having KDE so all-important to people? I
mean, I've seen more people want to change distributions just to get KDE,
which I just don't understand. I'm just curious...seems a bit odd to me.
The KDE bits in unstable are compiled with gcc-3.0/g++-3.0 and even they
needed patching. I'm working with the maintainer of the core KDE stuff on
this (Ivan), but he knows more about the state of the package for Alpha
than I do (I'm just a compiler and debugging monkey for this
one). Mozilla falls into the same C++ hole as KDE, except that the
mozilla folks haven't gotten around to making the code compile happily
with new gcc versions (they hard-code some demangling, etc, which is not
good). Once/If I can get it to compile properly, I'll upload it and try
to get it into woody. Ah, hell, just realised that mozilla-cvs is non-US,
so I can't do that. But I *can* make a patch and post it :-P I'll try
that.
> I then tried Redhat 7.0 and FreeBSD 4.3 and they were
> extremly unstable as well! (Actually I think it was XFree86
> that caused 99% of the problems). Then I tried SuSE 7.1RC
> and I'm still running it and I've found it to be very
> stable! I've had a few X-freezes but nothing compared to
> Debian/Redhat/FreeBSD.
So X was the stumbling block for woody when you tried it? What WM and
apps froze most often? Also, were these freezes locking up the computer
totally, or just locking up X?
> How much better has Debian Woody/Alpha become the last 6
> months? I *really* like Debian, I use it on ALL of my other
> boxes (10 or so) and it's the most stable distro of them
> all on Intel! Is it worth spending a night reinstalling my
> Alpha?
It's up to you. I haven't really played much with SuSE, but it seems like
a good distribution. If it's stable doing what you do with your Alpha,
then I wouldn't recommend changing it too much (especially if you have to
do real work on your machine, like I do...reinstallation is NOT an option
for me because too many things may change). If, however, it's a fun box,
then do what you like...install Debian, leave SuSE on, whatever...it's
your preference :-)
One question back to you: if you saw all of these problems, did you file
bug reports? It is *REALLY* difficult to fix things if we don't know that
they are broken. User feedback is critical.
> Also, has anyone gotten LVM and ReiserFS to work together
> on Alpha? I can't get Alpha LVM to work on 2.4.x (vgchange
> segfaults) but it's working in 2.2.19. And I can't get
> ReiserFS to work on 2.2.19 but it's working in 2.4.x...
> I've tried both releases and CVS-snapshots.
ReiserFS is much better in 2.4.x on Alpha. I've got an i386 at home with
a ReiserFS volume and have been toying with doing the same on Alpha. It
seems that some of the patches that went in to 2.4.x haven't made it to
the 2.2.x kernels (and may never make it since 2.2.20 may be the end of
the 2.2 line). As for LVM, can you detail the experiences with it? I may
be able to debug it if I can reproduce the problems. I've never tried
it, personally, but was intending on doing so.
C
Reply to: