My initial experiances with FC2-test2

[Chris Chabot]

Hi All, just wanted to share a few of my observations while running 
FC2-test2, and maybe make life a little easier for people with the same 
problems as me.

1) My machine is currently equiped with a ATI Radeon 9800XT card, 
XFree86 (scrap that, xorg nowadays) has no support for it, and your 
forced to run in VESA mode. While this is fine for a server machine 
where you only run the occasional vnc server or a system-config-... 
tool, for a workstation it's just to damn dog slow.. Getting the get ATI 
supplied driver to work with the 2.6.x kernel seemed imposible (with 
some source hacking it compiled, but the kernel driver still failed with 
some 'invalid address' option); So i ended up downgrading my FC2-test2 
instalation to a 2.4 kernel.. What you do  is to download the latest 
2.4.x kernel rpm's from the FC1 repository, then edit your 
/etc/modules.conf (i had to add usb, sound and ethernet card aliases in 
there), re-make your initrd for this kernel (mkinitrd), and setup lilo 
or grub for the new kernel.. After this the ATI driver compiled and 
installed without any problems, and i have fully accelerated X again 
(and 3D support). I won't say that 2.4.x is slower or faster then 2.6.x, 
but the graphical lack of speed with non accelerated X drivers, makes 
this downgrade a huge speedup

2) I have a wireless optical mouse thingy, which only works on USB. I 
noticed that the default movement speed of a mouse in X is quite slow, 
so i went to the gnome-control-center to speed things up a bit.. To my 
supprise i could slide sliders to my hearts content, but with no visible 
changes.. It turns out the default XF86Config is configured for 2 mouse 
inputs (old style psaux mice, and usb mice).. And gnome-control-center's 
mouse applet only changed the settings for the core mouse.. Resolution 
was to remove the "Mouse0" device input section, rename the device id 
for DevInputMice to Mouse0, and remove the DevInputMice reference in the 
ServerLayout section... After this the mouse configuration set the mouse 
speed for my usb mouse nicely again

3) While trying to do a big upgrade from FC2-test1 to the recent 
development tree, YUM crashed out on me.. After some digging in it's 
python sources i found that it fails on a RPM package version compare, 
where one package has no 'release' tag.. While it looks like YUM should 
deal with the release being 'None', it didn't..  The workaround i 
applied to get things working again was to edit 
/usr/share/yum/rpmUtils.py and at line 121 add these lines:
if r2 == None:
       r2 = '0'

4) My Audigy with only digital sound out... Sigh this has always been 
and always be a problem it seems. The new 2.6 and the old 2.4 drivers 
support the card perfectly, but have no way to configure it for using 
the digital sound output instead of the analog one; Or atleast as far as 
i know off! A work around used to be to compile the old emu10k1 tools 
and use it's tools to configure the card for digital out, but it seems 
with the new compilers, they won't compile anymore.. Haven't found a 
workaround for this yet, so for now my system is silent and without 
sound.. Anyone know a workaround/fix for this?


Well thats it for now.. All in all i love the way things are shaping up, 
that the above are the only complaints means the rest is working to my 
satisfaction

   -- Chris