F9: The good and the bad
All,
I've installed Fedora 9 and would like to share some notes about it.
All in all I was a bit deceived by some of its aspects, be them from
the system itself, KDE, or Konqueror. I think that nevertheless I
will perseverate and will not revert back to Fedora 8.
This is a x86 install. before doing the install, a backup of
/home/[user] and /etc/ from F8 was made, kept as a reference.
I do not want to draw a grim picture of Fedora 9. I might end up
keeping it after all, but I surely thought about reverting back to F8.
This machine is used for work and it seems I keep being trapped into
this idea of trying not the bleeding edge, not the alpha or beta, but
the official release, thinking that it would end up with a wow! effect
will keeping the functionality I had before, notwithstanding some
small adaptation to some possible (few) new ways of doing things.
It seems that time has not yet come. Coincidently, I always had
good experiences with even-numbered releases such as Fedora 6 and
Fedora 8. I still keep F6 at home with all the music-making apps
since it works so well. Too bad it's already outdated and there are
no new updates for it.
Maybe Fedora 10 will have a consistent wow! factor ?
The good things:
+ At least yum works !!!
+ xine from livna installs fine and plays some video fine.
+ using yum, claws-mail install fines and runs immediately, provided
that a previous .claws-mail was copied from F8 in the user
directory.
+ The DVD gave no (DMA or otherwise) errors whereas for F8 I had to
install from a USB key.
The not-so-good things:
* Add/Remove Software utility
- The Add/Remove software utility shows ´Downloading files´ endlessly
(internet connection is functional)
- Has no detailed feddback on what's going on
- Cannot do several tasks at once (waiting for other tasks to
complete) whereas kyum can.
Result: no software can be installed using this utility.
Is this the utility that got a spotlight in F9 new features ?
+ At least yum works !!!
* Konsole / video
- Konsole is no longer transparent whereas it was with F8
- Mouse rotary scroll button does not (worked with F8)
Konsole reports that the graphic capabilities are not good enough to
support transparency whereas F8 had no problem with that (on same
computer)
Video is:
Intel Corporation 82945G/GZ Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
A quite slow glxgears reports:
Failed to initialize TTM buffer manager. Falling back to classic.
4790 frames in 5.0 seconds = 957.905 FPS
XIO: fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0.0"
after 19132 requests (6276 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
Video is not so fast, perhaps slower than F8. glxgears is not
right. KDE looks nice, but is slow.
* Missing apps ?
- My favorite kyum is found by the yum installer but... kyum cannot
run because is misses kdesu.
yum install kdesu
Parsing package install arguments
No package kdesu available.
Nothing to do
- same with kpdf
* KDE (category: Bummer)
- Add Widgets widget - how to make it go away ?
- Multiple desktops - not easy to find where to add desktops.
Havent't found it yet. Bummer.
- taskbar - not easy to find how to make it disappear
automatically. Havent't found it yet. Bummer.
- auto mouse focus - not easy to find. Havent't found it
yet. Bummer.
- KDE System Settings: Search is broken as far as it cannot return
anything for ´keyboard´ whereas previous F8 KDE reporte a list of
possibilities. Is this an upgrade ?
* Fonts
Although the DejaVu LGC fonts are installed:
ls /usr/share/fonts/dejavu/
[...]
DejaVuLGCSansMono-Oblique.ttf
DejaVuLGCSansMono.ttf
[...]
It is not possible to use them as per the Fedora 8 system, as in:
emacs -fn "DejaVu LGC Sans Mono-12"
The system reports that the font is not found. What gives ?
* VmWare (category: very, very useful)
vmware cannot be installed per se because there are no sources
available for that kernel in the repositories.
uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 #1 SMP Thu May 1
06:28:41 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
And the listing has:
kernel-headers.i386 2.6.25.3-18.fc9 installed
Why aren't the headers the same ? And, where are they stored ?
Maybe I could install VmWare with these.
* Konqueror browser
- 'right-click' and 'back' does not go back anymore
I wonder what kind of upgrade in functionality this is.
* Printer
The two network printers couldn't be discovered automatically.
* Shares
The two CIFS shares can not be mounted. Still have to investigate
on that one.
These were the notes I've taken today. Any comments/hints are
appreciated.
Cheers,
Al