Fedora 16 instabilities

[Ian Malone]

On 11 January 2012 20:00, David A. De Graaf <dad at datix.us> wrote:
> Here's why Fedora 16 isn't ready for prime time.
> Many of these have been BZ'd, without effect.
>

And most are not 'instabilities', not aware of any system release that
hasn't had some problems, some are problems with particular programmes
rather than platform problems.

> - Shutdown takes much too long, and often fails completely, like
>  reboot.  This is quite annoying, especially with laptops.
>

I find shutdown pretty quick, faster than WinXP certainly. You may
have hardware or services that are being slow, possibly also related
to the mention of a machine not powering off.

> - Changing UID's to start at 1000 instead of 500 is just annoying.
>

Compatibility with other Linux systems, with different emphasis it's
*just* annoying.

> - The latest kernel, 3.1.7-1.fc16.x86_64, causes skype to crash
>  unless it is run with strace, in which case it fails to fail.
>  Go figure!
>

As others have said it's closed source and does funny stuff. It's also
now owned by MS. That said, Skype 2.2 here, static build on kernel
3.1.7-1.fc16.x86_64 is working fine.

> - On one laptop the NumLock will sometimes turn itself on.  This can
>  be annoying if a password must be typed.
>
> - On one machine, the password had be typed quickly in a console.  The
>  root password was too hard to type to meet that requirement.
>  However, if it was entered by cut-and-paste, it was OK.
>  In X, there was no problem.
>
> - On one machine (of seven) the CD drawer pops open at random times.

Weird list of things that sound more like hardware problems than anything else.

>
> - An older nvidia NV18 GeForce4 MX 440 card requires the earlier
>  version of the nvidia driver - which is no longer supported.  The
>  nouveau driver doesn't work nearly as well.  A perfectly functional
>  video card is rendered disfunctional.

I used to have one of those, they pre-date nouveau. nvidia still
support it, rpmfusion probably didn't think anyone would still need to
use these 96.43.20. If you asked nicely they might put it back, or you
could investigate how to rpmbuild the package from the src.rpm and the
binary blob.

> - The rt2500usb driver for my DLink USB wireless transceiver won't
>  work reliably unless I disable power management with:
>    iwconfig wlan0 power off
>  However, trying to do this automatically in a control file,
>    /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/16-power
>  only works sometimes.  Another puzzling and annoying randomness.
>

See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=731672#c19 last
paragraph of that comment for a better fix. You're not doing it in a
place where it's reliably started in time.

> - A directory, ~/.gvfs, cannot be read even by root.  This should be
>  impossible in a sane Linux system.  This unacceptable behaviour can
>  be expunged by removing the gvfs-fuse package, which takes with it
>  the shotwell, totem, and totem-nautilus packages.  So far, I haven't
>  noticed any loss of functionality.
>

In my experience root should not expect to be able to read all points
on the filesystem, this is more obvious when you consider remote
filesystems, but also makes sense for virtual ones.

-- 
imalone