Ph3ar my 3117 haxoring sk1llz

Workin' on it! Sheesh!

[jaguar]

or mabye update to 9.7

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by Undertoad
If you folks would just log into bugzilla.mozilla.org, and vote...

Done.

I don't see much point in updating to 0.9.7 if the bugs aren't fixed.

[jaguar]

other bug fixes?
how will you know what bugs you report arne't fixed if you don't have at least the newest milestone?

Take my word for it, they're not fixed.

[jaguar]

we know
its other bugs i'm talking about.

Well I think we're only talking about the text area bugs, you nerd.

[jaguar]

this form the guy that occasionaly stop refreshing cellar to work on HPUX boxen =p
stil lbest to have hte latest build, or milestone

I can't help it. The Navy uses HP-UX. So sometimes I have to work on HP-UX.

[jaguar]

its a bit like saying "occasionally, i have to gnaw off my left hand"
what do you usually do?

Solaris.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by jaguar
stil lbest to have hte latest build, or milestone

Not always. Trust me. :-)

After more than thirty years working in software development, seven of which was direct involvement as a support engineer, I can say with confidence that immediately upgrading to every new thing that comes down the pipe is *not* always the best strategy to maximize stability and minimize effort. There's an art to pickling out the sweet spot as to how much/often to upgrade.

Naturally, when I was dealing with customer issues, I often would urge them to get uplevel if they were backlevel...especially seriously backlevel. But in most cases we were dealing with issues whose cause was not clear, and we didn't have anywhere *near* the userbase Mozilla has. And furthermore if we managed to establish that there was actually a defect in the product, I would still have to get it to reproduce in *current* code in order to get the developer to look at the issue.

This is a different situation. I *like* my Mozilla in general. I have good workarounds for the bugs that have bit me so far. And the status of those bugs is *immediately* knowable on Bugzilla. If I pull down a new milestone, it takes time and effort on my part, and exposes me to a random collection of new defects that may be in the new code, which I'll then have to work out resolutions for. If I knew that 0.9.7 would have goodness in it that would make it worth my while, I'd pursue it.

My next big put-new-code-in-the-box project will be RedHat 7.2...at which point even though I know it fixes major issues in the crappy code RH shipped to manage dial-up ppp, I'll still fret about whether my nVidia display driver (which is actually a binary in RPM drag) and Equinox multport serial card driver will work correctly with the new kernel. There's no particular *reason* to think they won't, of course.

Well, it depends on what your goal is with regard to having the software. I use Mozilla because <b>I want it to get better</b>. If I use it and fill out the bug reports, send in crash info, etc, they will use it to make it better. If I used Netscape or Konq or whatever, Mozilla doesn't get better. As it is, I think Mozilla is the best browser on Linux anyway, but that's really just a nice bonus and not my main motivation.

Maggie - Use the binaries from http://www.nvidia.com when you upgrade instead of going with what RedHat ships. Well. If you play 3D games, anyway. I don't believe RedHat ships the NVIDIA drivers - actually, I'm positive of it. The only non-open software they ship is Netscape Communicator, and they're looking to ditch that pretty soon.

As for dist-upgrades, you shouldn't have any problem unless you're like me and muck with all sorts of things to make your system run *exactly* how you want it to. I am stupid and do this. Therefore, once I have an install in place, I cannot ever do a dist-upgrade, because it will break things. That's okay - I upgrade things as I see fit. Every once in a while I might kill everything except my home partition and start again fresh with whatever the latest is. But generally I just leave it be and take care of things by hand. This tends to work well.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by dhamsaic
Maggie - Use the binaries from http://www.nvidia.com when you upgrade instead of going with what RedHat ships. Well. If you play 3D games, anyway. I don't believe RedHat ships the NVIDIA drivers - actually, I'm positive of it.

No, they don't. Which is why I'm running binaries from nvidia.com already, you see. If RH7.2 breaks nVidia, it could be a big PITA to straighten things out, and I need this machine to *work* for job searching. The nVidia board was a surplus gift from a friend, but I've gotten accustomed to the high-res display and accelleration performance. I run Descent II a lot and the FlightGear sim a little bit. There was also some rumbling about Bad Craziness in the newer nVidia binaries...haven't looked into that lately to see if it was resolved.

As for dist-upgrades, you shouldn't have any problem unless you're like me and muck with all sorts of things to make your system run *exactly* how you want it to. I am stupid and do this. Therefore, once I have an install in place, I cannot ever do a dist-upgrade, because it will break things...

Well, I've diddlled just enough things to make me cautious about just slamming in a new dist-upgrade...and the display driver and the Equinox board are the biggest targets for that sort of thing. There's prolly a bunch of stuff on RH7.2 that will be in the nice-to-have category...in fact I already installed the StarOffice5.2 that came with the CDs because I needed it to typeset the ham radio club newsletter that I'm now editing.

I just need to clear out a little headspace, energy and time to be prepared to repair any goofy little shit that breaks when I do the upgrade. For Kasumi (my machine's name) to be down is a headache for me *and* Gwen, because Kasumi is the household gateway.

When I was working and had the extra time, resources and wideband net access , I used to run the latest Moz flavor-of-the-month and religiously sent in the Talkbacks. I don't feel like I have the slack for that at the moment. I did do the Bugzilla votes though...my good netizenship deed for the week. I do want Mozilla to get better than it is, but I use it because it *is* better than the other browsers already, except of course for the spots where's it's currently broken. I scoot around those for now, and it's not like they're not already well-known issues.

If you upgrade, your kernel will be new, and you'll need new RPM's from nvidia (or build it from source - stupid on RedHat). Just be smart - download the RPM's you'll need beforehand, do the dist-upgrade, install the RPM's, edit XF86Config-4, and you should be good to go. As for the other card/whatever, I'm not sure. I'd have to research it, as I am ignorant of it at the moment. I personally prefer hand-installing RPM's. You may want to look into apt-get for RPM - this is extremely helpful. It's got it's own thread under the "Technology" forum, if you're interested. I linked to it in there. This makes keeping RedHat up-to-date much easier than hand-installing RPM's.