Fedora Core 4: Worst Upgrade Ever

Fedora Core 4 is the worst software upgrade I have ever encountered. I installed it on both my laptop and desktop systems, and now I am in hell.

I guess I should have taken it as a sign that when I tried to open a bug report against the test release, it was closed as soon as the maintainer found out I was using ReiserFS. Yes, in 2005 the Red Hat team still won't support anything but ext3 filesystems.

You may remember from previous entries the work I put into making hepcat, a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, do suspend-to-disk correctly. The Fedora Core 4 upgrade broke that. It would suspend fine, but coming out would trigger a shutdown.

I thought I'd try building a new kernel, in case there was some incompatibility with the utilities. I started losing confidence quickly. When a version 2.6.11 RPM builds a kernel that calls itself 2.6.12, it's time to get nervous.

I did get the kernel built, but it wouldn't boot. The problem is that the install is creating a bunged initrd that didn't load required device mapper modules. I suppose I could create the image by hand. But at this point, it seems easier to just wipe the laptop and install a Linux that works.

The wipe-and-reload solution is viable for the laptop. Not so for my main workstation. That's unfortunate, because chinacat is in just as bad a shape. Ever since the Fedora Core 4 upgrade, I cannot sync my calendar to my PDA phone. In fact, it's totally erased the calendar in my phone.

Even better, the syncs have started triggering kernel panics. Even if it was a "Stoopid Configuration Error" causing the calendar problems, system crashes are not acceptable in a production product.

Here is what a blue screen of death looks like on Fedora:

Jun 28 23:14:33 chinacat kernel: usb 3-2: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB0
Jun 28 23:14:33 chinacat kernel: usb 3-2: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB1
Jun 28 23:14:41 chinacat kernel: visor ttyUSB1: Device lied about number of ports, please use a lower one.
Jun 28 23:14:49 chinacat last message repeated 4 times
Jun 28 23:14:51 chinacat kernel: visor ttyUSB1: Device lied about number of ports, please use a lower one.
Jun 28 23:14:52 chinacat kernel: usb 3-2: USB disconnect, address 11
Jun 28 23:14:52 chinacat kernel: general protection fault: 0000 [1]
Jun 28 23:14:52 chinacat kernel: CPU 0
Jun 28 23:14:52 chinacat kernel: Modules linked in: visor usbserial cdc_acm radeon drm cryptoloop loop md5 ipv6 parport_pc lp parport autofs4 video button battery ac uhci_hcd ehci_hcd shpchp i2c_viapro i2c_core snd_via82xx gameport snd_ac97_codec snd_seq_dummy snd_seq_oss snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss snd_pcm snd_timer snd_page_alloc snd_mpu401_uart snd_rawmidi snd_seq_device snd soundcore 8139too mii floppy dm_snapshot dm_zero dm_mirror reiserfs dm_mod sata_via libata sd_mod scsi_mod
Jun 28 23:14:52 chinacat kernel: Pid: 4, comm: events/0 Tainted: G M 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4

Fedora Core 4 is a very, very disappointing release.