By Stephen Shankland, 9 June 2004 09:00
NEWS Red Hat's newest hobbyist and developer version of Linux, Fedora Core 2, caused trouble for some who found they couldn't start Windows after installing the Linux upgrade side by side with it.
The bug had cropped up in testing, but after Red Hat released Fedora Core 2 in May, many more users reported their systems no longer would boot Windows.
No data on the Windows side was destroyed and some manual hard drive reconfiguration fixed the problem.
Red Hat programmer Cristian Gafton said in an email interview: "We do not think this is a severe problem" because information isn't destroyed, the problem is repairable and "a very small fraction of systems are affected."
However, he added: "We recognise that it is an annoying issue for the users that are affected by it and we are working on publishing a fix that will address it."
Fedora Core is designed to satisfy the appetites of those who want the latest software while maturing Linux improvements more quickly for use in the corporate product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The company makes no pretenses of Fedora's stability; the website includes the disclaimer, "The Fedora Project is not a supported product of Red Hat."
Until 2002, Red Hat offered an identical version of Linux as a free, unsupported download or as a paid product with support. Now only Fedora Core 2 is available for free, while Enterprise Linux, which changes more slowly, costs between $349 and $18,000 per one-year support subscription.
The problem with Fedora Core 2 apparently had to do with changes made to a computer's description of the physical layout of its hard disk, data called the partition table, Gafton said.
In some cases, Fedora Core 2 would use a different convention to record the information and Windows XP wouldn't recognise the disk. In other cases, the problem stemmed differences in how Windows, Linux and a computer's BIOS - basic input-output software used in the early stages of starting a computer - handle the partition table information, Gafton said.
Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com
Comments
There are 5 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
At least the Linux distributer acknowledges this is a bug. If you install Windows on a computer that already has Red Hat, don't expect to be able to boot Linux, and don't expect Microsoft to help you.
2. Billy Gibson
Charging for Linux will make acceptance of the OS tougher. At the end of the post it quotes redhat as costing $300+. The biggest benefit of the linux OS over M$ Windows is the fact it is/was free to use!
RH are getting greedy and may very well see any hopes of the OS becoming widely used disappear.
3. Jack Strangio
I think this 'feature' is hilarious. For years now, Windows has wiped out competitors filesystems or disabled their booting with no apologies. Now that the reverse has (unintentionally, it seems) happened, it's big news!
Seriously, ALL operating systems should respect the disk real-estate of other operating sytems.
4. Skippy
You misread it. You pay for support, linux is free. However, they are clouding this now by making one version free and the other only free if you buy support.
Unless I misunderstand something, they are violating the distribution license of Linux which states you must have the software available for free. So if RH is not available for free somewhere, then they would be in violation of that. Correct?
5. Ray
Actually, Redhat charges for support and their compilation of various Open Source software. All of this is legal according to GPL as long as Redhat provides the source code to the software. They are not required to provide complilations or binary files, just source files. Anyone can go to Redhat and download the source files for RedHat Enterprise Linux and build the software themselves. There are many RHEL clones that do just that. There is just NO support for the products if you do build the software yourself.