Re: A few comments about Knoppix 5.1

[gilpel@altern.org]

Le 1 Janvier 2007 18:32, John Woods a écrit :

> I am really glad that the ndiswrapper kernel module works out of
> the box. Thank You for that.
>
> Gilpel, this release has some very important high points as well...
> ntfs-3g for one thing. Reliable read/write on Windows drives. That
> is quite frankly... a milestone.

There are certainly quite a vit of milestones laid on the road. I 
agree with Sebastian Rahtz when he writes that "Knoppix is an 
incredibly hard thing to test, comprising as it does an entire
Linux distribution built from many applications. Klaus does not
deserve the disapprobation...."

I certainly don't disapprove Klaus' efforts, but all those solved bugs 
that keep popping back is unacceptable. OTOH, I tried Fedora's 
Live-CD recently and, believe me, with an old CD reader rolling at 
10x, you better be patient. It seems those people have never heard 
about DMA.

> I think this kind of thing can be avoided with a bit more formal
> alpha testing. I would not mind if Klaus threw an alpha release
> that expired out for testing. Would anyone else? That is my
> suggestion. Make available to the community at large... limited use
> alpha testing versions.

What if we said the present release is an alpha?

> I have a one problem I need to report though. The virtual desktops.
> If I click Desktop 2, 3, or 4, the whole taskbar goes away. This
> may be related to the problem with Klipper gilpel. I have to use
> the Ctrl-F1 hotkey. Am I the only one with this problem?

Same here. So, who should fix the bug? Klaus? Debian? Konqueror? How 
long do you believe it will take before the few bugs we have found 
will be fixed... this CA/CF keyboard problem or the diacritic 
characters in OOo, for instance? Will the fixes propagate? Will they 
reappear in the next version? Those are my questions. 

For now, it appears to me that Linux has a break it all model rather 
than a development model. Despite tremendous progress, I never had in 
my hands one single Linux release I could hand to a beginner and say 
"Try this". There would always have been a need for lots of excuse 
this and that, you have to fix this and that, etc.

> Happy New Year!

Yes to all on the list from me too. Let's hope we can MAKE it happy.