Feedback on "The ups and downs of Fedora 10"

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi Northbear,

I came across your short review of Fedora 10 at

http://www.raiden.net/?cat=2&aid=498

Thank for your review. I would like to add some comments to provide more 
information and correct a few inaccuracies in your article.

You claim that the installation is almost exactly same as Fedora 8. 
Apart from resizing support you have noted, it seems that you have 
missed out a number of other changes. These are covered in

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/sn-Installer.html#sn-Changes-in-Anaconda
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/What_is_New_for_Installation_and_Live_Images.html#sn-Changes_in_Anaconda

"Well, Fedora/RedHat has always been very picky about letting in 
software that might be "tainted", so there's no way that the resize code 
will work on NTFS filesystems."

This is incorrect. As noted, in your review, your are commenting about 
something without even trying it. Fedora has included comprehensive NTFS 
support for quite a few releases now and has also supported resizing 
Windows partitions from Fedora 9 onwards.

"Whoa! The new "Plymouth" loader is fast! You won't get much in the way 
of fancy graphics during bootup unless you have a video chipset that is 
supported with "kernel mode" (currently only some Intel chipsets)."

This is only partially correct. Plymouth relies on kernel mode setting 
support but that is available only for ATI cards and not for Intel ones. 
Intel was supported in between but there is a rewrite going on in 
upstream and is still disabled in the general release. You can however 
get fancy graphics by using vga=0x318 or vga=ask and choosing a 
appropriate mode which would make Plymouth use framebuffer instead of 
KMS to display a very cool bootup screen.

There is a rewrite of GDM and currently.

http://live.gnome.org/GDM/NewDesign

it just inherits the system settings and does not have separate theming 
support. The roadmap for changes is at

http://live.gnome.org/GDM/

For the Xorg autoconfiguration, we don't need to fallback into manual 
settings again but instead add the specific hardware information to a 
database and use that for automatically doing the right thing even if 
the hardware is old or using analog connections as yours does. Please 
file a bug report in http://bugzilla.redhat.com with the output of 
/var/log/Xorg.log. We can fix this and send the fix upstream for the 
benefit for all distributions as well.

KDE 4: Again, would be quite useful to get bug report to keep track of 
the issues and address them

PackageKit: The PackageKit daemon is not a regular service and hence it 
is not managed by the service administration gui. It is a system 
activated daemon and automatically starts on demand and stops as soon as 
the task is done.

It would be great if you could update your review to include all these 
information and provide us with some bug reports on the warts you have 
noted. Once again, thank you for your review. We appreciate your input.

Rahul