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I did a <a
href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum">yum
distro-sync upgrade</a> last night from F15 to F16 beta on my
x86_64 desktop with an ASUS P5Q SE2 motherboard. Here are the
problems I encountered and my initial impressions.<br>
<br>
I've been away from this list for a while, so forgive me if some of
these issues have already been brought up here.<br>
<br>
My machine wouldn't boot after the upgrade. When it got the point
where grub should have started doing something, it displayed a black
screen with the dreaded "Error 18" message at the top. I did a
little research and discovered that grub is being replaced with
grub2 in F16. I don't know if this replacement would have happened
automatically if I'd used preupgrade instead of yum distro-sync.
Here's what I had to do to solve the problem:<br>
<ol>
<li>Boot from an install DVD in rescue mode.</li>
<li>Copy the os-prober and grub2 RPMs from the install DVD into
/mnt/sysimage.</li>
<li>Chroot to /mnt/sysimage and do the following:</li>
<ol>
<li>"rpm -e grub" and "rpm -U os-prober*.rpm grub2*.rpm".</li>
<li>Run "/sbin/grub2-mkdevicemap --no-floppy" to avoid <a
href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732076">bug
732076</a>.</li>
<li>Generate a grub2 config with "/sbin/grub2-mkconfig >
/boot/grub2/grub.cfg".</li>
</ol>
<li>"/sbin/grub2-install /dev/sda".</li>
</ol>
I don't know if grub is supposed to keep working in F16 for people
who don't want to switch over to grub2. If so, then there's clearly
a problem here, although I'm not going to file a bug about it
because like I said I don't know if it's supposed to keep working.<br>
<br>
I've updated the yum distro-sync page on the Wiki to document the
need to switch to grub2. I'd be much obliged if people would look
over <a
href="https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum&diff=256261&oldid=254667">my
changes</a> to make sure they're OK.<br>
<br>
Somehow when I was in the process of rebooting repeatedly trying to
figure out why grub wouldn't boot, the BIOS decided to lose its
NVRAM settings and I had to reset them. I don't know why this
happened, but I doubt it has anything to do with Linux. The only
reason I upgrade is because it caused my sound to stop working later
because the BIOS setting for the front panel reverted to the
default, High Definition Audio, when it should have been set to
AC97. It took me quite a while to figure that out; until I did, I
was blaming the upgrade for the fact that my sound had stopped
working, when in fact it wasn't responsible.<br>
<br>
I had cups enabled to start on boot in F15. That was lost in the
upgrade to F16. I've filed <a
href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=744223">bug
744223</a> about this. It was closed with a comment that I should
use "use systemd-sysv-convert --apply cups" to carry over the
settings. I have to say that I think this is incredibly poor design.
If I'm a user doing an upgrade, I sure as hell do not want to have
to go through every single upgraded package and carry over all the
settings automatically. The transition from SysV to systemd should
have included the design and implementation of a mechanism for
carrying over this information automatically. I had the same problem
with saslauthd.<br>
<br>
There's a similar problem with openvpn, but "systemd-sysv-convert
--apply openvpn" doesn't solve it. I've filed <a
href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=744244">bug
744244</a> about this.<br>
<br>
Is there a way to get systemctl to list services that are not
enabled? I couldn't find one.<br>
<br>
In the course of the upgrade I went from emacs-23.2-19.fc15 to
emacs-23.3-7.fc16. After the upgrade, /usr/bin/emacs was still the
old 23.2 emacs binary. There have been problems in the past with the
emacs RPM not doing the right thing, so it's possible that I had
created /usr/bin/emacs as a hard link so alternatives was unwilling
to remove it. Having said that, when I removed it myself and then
ran "yum reinstall emacs", the /usr/bin/emacs link was fixed, but
/usr/bin/emacs-23.3 was replaced with a zero-length file! At least,
I think that's what happened. All in all, something seems very
fragile in how the emacs RPM handles the alternatives stuff, but I'm
not equipped to reproduce it, so I'm not comfortable filing a bug
about it.<br>
<br>
Gnome-shell-extension-dock is apparently broken. Not only that, but
it has the ability to hang or crash gnome-shell when you try to use
it. I've filed <a
href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=744227">bug
744227</a> about this.<br>
<br>
I've gotten the "Something has gone wrong and you need to log out
and log back" screen from gnome-shell several times. There have also
been several instances where the shell has started behaving funkily
and I needed to stop and restart prefdm.service from another virtual
terminal. Some of these were when I was trying to get the dock
extension to work, but not all of them were. There was at least one
instance where the shell was broken (couldn't change window focus,
buttons were missing from window title bars), immediately when I
logged in, before I'd even done anything. None of this is
reproducible enough to report as a bug, but it's worrisome.<br>
<br>
F16 still has a problem that I first noticed in F15. When I first
log in, the volume control in the top bar shows only the Volume
slider, i.e., the Microphone slider is missing. At some point after
I log in, the Microphone slider suddenly starts showing up in the
drop-down. I assume that I'm doing something that causes that to
happen, but I've been unable to figure out what it is. I've filed
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">
<a href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=744240">Bug
744240</a> about this.<br>
<br>
A few minutes ago I caught gnome-shell consuming a huge amount of
CPU and hosing my machine. I don't know what caused it to do that,
but restarting it with Alt-F2 r made it stop, at least for the time
being. If it happens again I'll file a bug or try to find out if
someone else has already done so.<br>
<br>
I just encountered an interesting Google Chrome bug. I don't know if
it's unique to F16 or is also in F15, and it's also probably not a
Fedora bug but rather is Chrome's fault, but it's amusing enough
that I thought I'd mention it... If you have multiple monitors, and
you maximize a Chrome window on a non-primary monitor and then hit
F11 to go into full-screen mode, you can't get out of full-screen
mode: hitting F11 again flashes in non-full-screen mode briefly and
then reverts to full-screen mode. This doesn't happen on your
primary monitor, and it doesn't happen if the window isn't maximized
before you hit F11. It also doesn't happen with Firefox.<br>
<br>
I just recently added my secondary monitor, and I found it
interesting to discover today when playing with workspaces in F16
that the non-primary monitors are ignored, and apparently that is <a
href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=609258">by design</a>.<br>
<br>
After the upgrade from F15 to F16, suspend on idle got turned on,
i.e., the "Suspend when inactive for:" setting in the "Power" pane
of the system settings app, even though it certainly wasn't turned
on before the upgrade. I've filed <a
href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=744257">bug
744257</a> about this.<br>
<br>
If I have a data CD in the CD-ROM drive, then every time I log in a
notification shows up at the bottom of the screen asking me whether
I want to open the files on the CD or eject it. This is somewhat
annoying. In my opinion, the notification should only be displayed
when a CD is inserted, not when one was there already at login.<br>
<br>
I installed the gnome-shell-extension-icon-manager RPM and restarted
gnome-shell, but it still doesn't show up in the list of available
extensions. I added a comment about this to <a
href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=734904">bug
734904</a>, which is sort of related to this issue.<br>
<br>
That's all for now. Congratulations if you've made it this far. :-)<br>
<br>
jik<br>
<br>
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