Re: FC2 doubtful quality?

HaJo Schatz wrote:

One more question:

I've installed the usual TTF fonts as follows:
mkdir /usr/share/fonts/ttf
cd /usr/share/fonts/ttf
cp /foo/*.ttf .
ttmkfdir
mkfontdir
chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/ttf

I can see the fonts in the apps. But Netscape 7.1, when rendering say
Arial in small font sizes, looks horrible, like not anti-aliased at all.
Mozilla doesn't have this problem though.

Any ideas?

HaJo
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 14:54, HaJo Schatz wrote:

Hi List,

Long story, short question: Should I fall back to FC1 instead of using
FC2? I am somewhat very concerned about the release quality of FC2.
Here's what happened:

I just upgraded a laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens E2010) from RH9 to FC2. After
that, I couldn't log on to Gnome, after username/password, X just hung
without any error message, neither in the logs. Never mind, I did a
fresh install instead & immediately after updated all the packages. Then
the surprises really started:

- Service PCMCIA doesn't load the yento-sockets module. This is known @
bugzilla, one has to patch the pcmcia script by hand. Through this bug,
the PCMCIA subsystem is non-functional!
- Kernel 2.6.6-1.435 gives a "failed to bind key 255 to value..." every
time you log in at a console, whereas kernel -358 doesn't. This appeared
at bugzilla but was closed as "magically disappeared"
- Hotplug calls the script ide, which in turn calls /sbin/ide_info.
/sbin/ide_info simply doesn't exist! Had to copy it in from a FC1
install. Through this bug, you can't mount CF-Cards in a PCMCIA adapter.
Just found out that bugzilla also knows about this -- since FC2 test3!
- USB updfstab doesn't work. Devices get detected in the kernel, hotplug
@ updfstab gets executed, but /mnt & fstab entries are not created.
Trying to debug, I realized that the issue is somehow timing-related.
When I do some sleep at the "right" points in the updfstab scripts,
things work sometimes. Can't resolve the issue though and have to live
without using my Flash-Stick & Camera reliably.
- Kernel -435 sometimes segfaults when plugging USB devices in/out,
whereas -358 seems reliable here.
- My console-beep (emitted through the sound card) disappeared ever
since FC2. I don't seem to be able to find a pointer on how to trace
this...

This is the result after a few hours of FC2 experience and I really
start wondering about what level of testing this release experienced
before being released into the public -- even IMHO obvious things like
the PCMCIA subsystem doesn't work! Seems to me that FC1 was by far the
more reliable system.

My question now is whether I should give up on FC2 (I'm really tempted)
and go back to FC1 or hang in there. - Will I experience more of these surprises with FC2?
- How fast will issues be attented to through updates? The PCMCIA issue
is known, so is the ide_info issue (since FC2 test3), but still no fix
today.
- Is this what we have to expect from a "community distro" in the long
run? As with RH9 the last consumer-distro is discontinued, my logical
conclusion would then be to leave RH behind and move on to another
packager, say Suse?

A bit disappointed,
HaJo

Although your post has obtained many replies since everybody feels touched by
the doubtful quality of FC2, nobody answered your question about TTF font
support in Netscape. Mozilla and Netscape are GTK applications, there are two
version of the GTK library: GTK1+ and GTK2+. Only GTK2+ supports
antialiased fonts so to have nice antialiased font effects look for a Netscape version
compiled with the GTK2+ library.

- Jose Luis