The state of rawhide
So...I've been finding the rawhide experience to be a little more raw
than usual since about when FC6 came out. I've not seen a lot of
complaints, though, which leads me to wonder if I'm the only one.
Here's some of what I've encountered on my x86-64 system:
- The system thrashes. I guess I'm an old-fashioned sort of guy, but I
really think that 1GB ought to be enough to run a basic desktop, even
on a 64-bit system. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Liferea are all leaky
as sieves; I have to restart them occasionally or the system just
bogs down. There is a memory-leak in gnome-terminal that I can't get
the developers to even look for. Tomboy is huge, but that may just
be part of life with mono.
- Gnome-terminal occasionally becomes unresponsive. Some windows work,
others do not - though they usually come back eventually. This
behavior seems to be correlated with the memory problems, but the
system is not thrashing while I'm waiting for a terminal to
acknowledge my existence.
- Gnucash now refuses to start. I get a lot of messages like "Failed
to dlopen() '/usr/lib64/gnucash/libgncmod-hbci.la': file not found".
The interesting thing being that the indicated files *do* exist.
- Metacity occasionally gets hung. It happens most often when trying
to resize a window, but I can also occasionally see it when using
menus from the panel at the bottom of the screen. The pointer goes
into an "I'm busy" state, and nobody gets any more keyboard or mouse
events. Switching out of X and back (alt-ctrl-F1) makes the hang go
away.
- I still have to clear out /var/lib/rpm/__db* fairly often.
Now I'm not complaining. I know the drill, and I'm sufficiently
masochistic (and backed up) to run rawhide on a system I use for real
work. But I begin to wonder if there might be something that has gone
fundamentally wrong on my system, or if this is just the way rawhide
works these days...?
Thanks,
jon