Linux Failed Me

First off, you need to realize this is not an angry rant. I have loved Linux from the first experience, when I installed RedHat 5.0 on an old 486. Once I understood it, and some of the philosophy behind it, this was where I wanted to be. I still wish it were so, but it’s not.

There has been an on-going issue for the particular hardware I run, a Dell 545 MT. I have used Vista, Win7, openSUSE 11.1 and 11.2, Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, and was unable to install my preferred CentOS 5.4. I managed to get SUSE 11.2 and Ubuntu 9.10 working rather well, except for one thing: burning disks. This machine features the ICH9 chipset, and my DVD-RW is SATA. When I try to burn disks larger than, say 250MB, it always fails. I read the logs, every log file I could find. There are over a dozen bug reports about this issue, and I tested every solution offered on every distro buglist which discussed it.

I don’t pretend to understand it, but I believe it has something to do with the interaction between udev and the burn process. Seems udev is polling the device during the burn, and somehow that interferes, and the burn stops. Brasero and other wodim front-ends fail consistently without useful error messages. K3B as a frontend for cdrecord works better, but still can’t finish anything much above 250MB. It seems to make a difference whether the settings include TAO or SAO, with the latter allowing a bigger ISO, but still failing at some point. Again, it’s over my head. I’ve spent hours reading about it on lists ranging from Ubuntu to Fedora, and too many had no useful discussion at all. Sometimes the submitter reports the issue resolved itself, but nothing they write helps me.

Among those who seem to understand it best, it would seem coordinating between the udev developers and the kernel driver developers is not straightforward. Each side seems to blame the other, though I don’t understand it well enough to be sure. What I do know is this has been reported as a problem starting two years ago, and is still unresolved. Now, it seems to me quite reasonable to assume it isn’t ever going to be fixed. It’s not a huge problem, because there are only a few of us using this particular hardware combination. At any rate, it’s not the hardware, because I burn flawless ISOs of all sizes, both CD and DVD, using Roxio under Vista.

I’m not at all happy running Vista, but I can’t afford to run out and buy new hardware. This expensive machine was a gift from someone who could afford it. I don’t have access to much else, except far older hardware. Nor do I have room to maintain a bank of different systems, even if I could afford them. I don’t have any real choices here. At this point I’m waiting to see if the BSDs will get all the drivers for my system, and may give one of them a try. Right now it seems bug reports indicate they are having issues, too. But this is Intel, which I believe is fully open to Open Source developers, so I can’t imagine why this remains broken two years after the first reports.

At any rate, I won’t be trying Linux any more on this machine.