Preupgrade and first thoughts

[Mark Eggers]

In short, there are some teething issues, but nothing that shouldn't be 
able to be worked around.

First of all, the basics for my system.

CPU:  	      Intel P4 at 2.60 GHz
Memory:	      1.5 GB RDR ram
Disk:	      120 GB IDE ext 3
Graphics:     NVidia 7600 GS overclocked
Driver:	      NVidia 275.09 from NVidia (beta)
Display:      Samsung SyncMaster 1680x1050

The good:

Preupgrade worked without having to depend on a wired connection.
Preupgrade correctly found enough space on /boot.

All custom settings were retained.

This is pretty amazing since this system has not had a fresh system
install since Fedora 9.

The expected:

I had to use Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get to command line mode to install the
NVidia driver.

The long:

With 3075 packages to upgrade, this process took a little over 6
hours.

The bad:

The timezone seems to have gotten borked. Both KDE and Gnome time
setting tools were unable to change this in a persistent way. I had
to use /usr/bin/system-config-date to make the persistent change.

It looks like the Cairo buggy gradient patch has been removed. This
results in poor performance for those people running NVidia cards with 
the NVidia blob for some operations.

Performance issues with GTKPerf. While most operations are slightly
faster, the GtkTextView - Add text operation is three times slower.

The system appears to use more memory than Fedora 14. I suppose this
is due to Gnome 3. I will have to make some detailed notes at a later
point.

Several minor SELinux issues. Bugs concerning ones with Fedora-only
components have been filed.

mysql_auth is missing a symbol, preventing HTTPD from starting if
this module is configured. I have commented it out for now, and will
submit a bug with the exact information later.

KPackageKit and yum don't seem to be in sync. Checking for updates
with KPackageKit produces no updates, while checking via the yum
command line lists updates.

Also, updates are listed twice when running yum from the command line.
For example:

---> Package parted.i686 0:2.3-8.fc15 will be updated
---> Package parted.i686 0:2.3-9.fc15 will be an updated

The ugly:

Boot messages are less clear, slowing down the ability to catch
boot-time errors. I had to diagnose the Apache HTTPD problem by
running /usr/sbin/apachectl start|stop and watching the console for
errors.

Fonts are a mess (again). Even including 10-autohint.conf doesn't
help. I will have to redo my ~/.fonts.conf again to get fonts clear,
clean, and crisp.

Fonts in Emacs (actually since late Fedora 14) are a mess. In order
to reduce artifacts, I have to use 14 pt. Courier New. Of course,
this means I can edit documents from across the room.

Lots of .xsession-errors entries due to what looks like race
conditions in KDE. This could be due to the beta driver. However, the
beta driver seems to have smoother performance than the released
270.41.19 driver.

Gnome 3 is pretty much unusable with custom fonts. I will spend time
resetting the fonts to default, then seeing if I can clean up the
theme. This is pretty low on a list of things to do, since Gnome 3
does not seem to fit my workflow (lots of different applications,
workspaces dedicated to tasks).

. . . . just my two cents.

/mde/