Ok, I just did an upgrade of the new Oxygen release. I ran into some problems.
First of all the graphical installer does not let you use the same partition as
both the source and the destination of an upgrade. The old text installer
dooesn't let you do this either but you can work around it by switching to
another virtual terminal and remounting the partition correctly. With the
graphical install it won't let you do this because it is actually running from
the partition (rather than in a ramdisk). It would be really convenient if the
partition was mounted R/w (or at least there was an option to do so). This
would/should allow to use the same partition as the source and destination of
upgrades.
I also ran into a few other problems. When trying to load the aha152x scsi
driver I don't know what kind of options it expects. It just doesn't work
(didn't work in previous versions of mandrake either.). I know that ot get it
to work I need the options for the module. The command I use to load it is
'insmod aha152x aha152x=0x340,9' I tried putting 'aha152x=0x340,9' and tried
just 0x340,9 and all sorts of combinations of these parameters but it just
refuses to load. Anyone know why this might be?
Another problem happened when trying to write the boot disk. It gave me an
"insmod loop failed" error.
When running mandrake I also noticed a few bugs. The DrakConf icon doesn't
work. I checked and the file "/usr/X11R6/bin/DrakConf" does not exist. Is it
just accidentally missing from my distro or did the upgrade forget to install
it?
When a ppp connection is configured to start at boot it is very annoying to
have to wait for it to come all the way up. Is there a way to set it to go up
in the background (it does this when it fails). I don't feel like waiting 30-60
seconds for it to come up.
Ohh yeah, I got a suggestion. Why not include an option in the
installer to set up a LOADLIN boot configuration. You do it for the lnx4wn
stuff, why not do it for regular installs too? Lilo is often not an option
because it refuses to work with certain partition/drive configurations. You
could do a simple nice little menu in config.sys. Also since we have that
whole interactive startup thing, why not have an option to select the runlevel
there? I had a problem with my X server not loading which made everything
unusable since I was running at RL 5..
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"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves elected President should
on no account be allowed to do the job."
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