Comments on: Red Hat Linux upgrade bug hides Windows

The company's newest hobbyist and developer version of Linux, Fedora Core 2, causes trouble for some who find they couldn't start Windows after installing the Linux upgrade side by side with it.

This affects all 2.6 kernel distributions

This is not a problem just with Fedora. Because of the popularity (and high expectations) of this distribution, it has been the mst visible, but Mandrake, SUSE and others are also affected. The 2.6 kernel is arguably doing the right thing whereas Windows (as usual) is arguably slightly broken. In any case, it's been a hot topic for weeks, and has been well discussed at Slashdot and many other sites.

Like the Fedora people said, it doesn't seem to be a serious flaw, although it could bite someone who wasn't technical and wasn't alerted to the possibility.

[kraterz]

Not just the 2.6 kernel, a combination of factors.

It is a combination of problems, partly due to the new way the 2.6 kernel reports disk geometry, and the way GRUB works, and the BIOS settings for the HDD (auto vs LBA).

Looks like the fedora chaps hadn't done enough testing. After numerous problems after RH9.0, I stopped using redhat / fedora, but have been working successfully with Debian and slackware, including debian's unstable and testing distros. I've installed the 2.6 kernel and upgraded GRUB on many different machines (Linux+2K/XP) and have never once come up with this dual boot problem.

This is not the only problem with fedora / redhat. When I tried getting some of my office mates (who are new to linux) to try it, so many things were broken, including some admin interfaces from GNOME, and lots of other stuff. Frankly, fedora is not useable in a production environment, even after being in testing for so many months, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, not even testers.

We switched them to Mandrake (and Debian for the techies) and they are very happy... the systems are very stable and work as advertised.

Information is old

The community has known about this for the last month or so. OSNews and Slashdot had this available 3 weeks to a month before this was posted. Post this when it's new; not when it's been out for a month.

[beckerbp]

This story should never have been published

It is a non-issue. A beta/test release that breaks Microsoft Windows dual-boot funtionality is of interest only to the testers and the developers. Any tester that experiments with a beta OS knows to expect bugs and possibly havoc, and would never expose real production systems and data to risk, so it should not be reported in this way. If this had been a final release of red Hat Linux and it performed this way, that would be news. This is not.