Rawhide: firefox and GNOME

[Jonathan Corbet]

Well, I finally got a rawhide update to work today.  Am I the only one
with an x86-64 system who has to keep clearing junk i386 packages out of
the way before I can get yum to do an update?

Firefox: initially it would not run at all; messing with the Pango
setting (as suggested by somebody else) didn't help.  Clearing the
.../default/gobbledegook directory made it work again, though without
any of my stuff.  Some quick messing around implicates the
compatibility.ini file, but I'm not sure of that.  Could do some more
directed testing if that would be useful to somebody.

With some combinations of files, the "edit preferences" dialog comes up
in a sort of unusable bad-acid mode.  Semi-transparent, unreadable, and
hard to grab with the mouse.  With the default settings that doesn't
seem to happen.

When firefox starts, it puts up a "checking for updates" window that
sits and spins until I put it out of its misery.

I have a question on the latest GNOME: am I the only one who dislikes
the new "electron cloud" busy cursor?  It's distracting in its own
right, but the fact that it makes the pointer jiggle is even more
annoying.  It's enough to make an editor decidedly grumpy.  Is that
cursor configurable anywhere?

Thanks,

jon

Jonathan Corbet
Executive editor, LWN.net
corbet at lwn.net