Mostly successful with f12

[Tom Horsley]

Got everything re-installed from scratch (I like to take
the opportunity to clean stuff up every 6 months rather than
trying to upgrade :-). My first backup successfully rsynced
my new installation to a USB drive in cron last night,
I can VPN to work with pptp and run NX sessions,
so things seem to be working well.

The only really weird bug I found is this one for gdb:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=539590

(I'm convinced that somewhere in Ulrich Drepper's
basement, possibly guarded by a 3 headed dog, is a
copy of the secret linux cabal's design document which
states the primary design goal for linux is to make
life a living hell for people who work on debuggers :-).

There was also this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=531370

but a "yum install foomatic" gets that printer working.

And this is fixed:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=524428

but hasn't yet made it to stable repo, so I have to
install xorg-x11-drv-evdev from updates-testing to get
my drag lock setting to work.

I gave in and started using pulseaudio (mainly because
I now have a separate sound card for doing spdif output
to my sound system which I turn off in pulse and dedicate
to mplayer), so I had to start the pulse daemon in my
custom .xsession. Finding the /etc/xdg/autostart/ directory
was useful for determining the command to run. I also now
am forced to start /usr/libexec/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1
or none of the little tools that want to become root can
ask how to do that (considering the 200 or so kernel daemons
and system services that typically start, and the 30 or 40
gnome daemons that run all the time before any actual user
applications get going, I wonder how long it will be before
the first linux server runs out of PIDs - there are only 32K
of them, and at the rate the gnome developers are following
the philosophy of "Why call a subroutine when I can send
dbus messages to a separate daemon instead?" it might
come sooner than anyone expects :-).