“I have been a user of Red Hat Linux for the last four years.
Before this time, I used Infomagic and Slackware. Being primarily a
Unix systems architect for the last 10 years, I sought a
distribution that, at the time, gave the most consistent results
while requiring the least amount of nursing….”
“Two weeks ago, I downloaded the ISO image of Red Hat 6.1 and
burned a CD-ROM with the intent of upgrading my current production
(work) environment, as well as the lab I have set up at home. I
have established a 100% installation success rate with all versions
of Red Hat–until version 6.1! I was completely shocked to find
that of the first four machines on which I tried to install Red Hat
6.1, I was successful with only two. One of the two that
succeeded required a network install because of connectivity
problems, and the remaining machine suffered significant ppp
problems.”
“The two problem machines were particularly annoying to me. The
first sits on top of my desk in a Fortune 50 aerospace company. It
is a dual boot Windows NT/Linux box with a 266 MHz Pentium, 128
megabytes of RAM, and a total of four gigabytes in hard drive
space. The primary IDE drive is used for NT. The Linux drive is a
two-gigabyte SCSI drive. When I first tried to install on this
system, I made it about five steps into the new, spiffy graphical
installer before it complained about the ext2 filesystem on
/dev/hda. This meant the filesystem on the IDE drive, which was
NTFS-based. Red Hat 6.1 had identified it incorrectly, informing me
that it would look for a viable Linux filesystem. I got my hopes
up, only to realize that the system ultimately hung! I repeated the
exercise several times, trying to use graphical and non-graphical
installer options, only to continually fail.”