On Thursday 27 January 2005 3:31 pm, Jim Cornette flailed at a keyboard and produced this:
- It is less capable than even late 1990's M$ when you are trying to setup dual-displays.
- Some drivers are intentionally deleted because "nobody has this hardware any longer".
- Some programs have lower functionality than they had when they were first created.
- Disabling ICONs in the menus (mozilla) and not using the default icons that were provided from the projects. (confusing and too blue)
I, personally, can't think of any reason why Fedora would suck for me. It does all that I need it to do: web browsing, e-mail, writing (very important for me), programming (mostly web development), music and DVD's. I'm not much of a gamer, so that isn't important to me.
Following the development of RHL 10 (Switched to FC1 in process) and using RHL since version 4.2 (5.2 and beyond on a regular basis). I am impressed overall with Fedora and the RHL versions that it transitioned from. I have become more impressed with Fedora and Linux in general. But looking back at other OSes and the problems and features that were available in earlier days and what is not yet reliable in Linux does give you some reason to wonder if Linux will ever catch up, since they are so far back on getting out of the gate. Dual-display is one of the areas where I see a 6 yr gap in Linux. (xorg-x11, maybe xfree86 also) getting at a stage where it should be today.
I would expect one video driver and another video driver to be able to correctly allocate memory regions for each card, without overlapping the other video cards space.
I'm not sure if picking memory regions for the limited video drivers supplied with xorg-x11 that work, but do not overlap with each other would be good practice. Or to have the server dynamically figure out what memory regions to assign the cards through the internal modules within xorg-x11 would be a better way to approach the problem.
My thnking is that the drivers ought to be made to not overlap the same memory regions as much as possible, then get feedback from any overlapping memory allocations that are stated in Xorg.0.log and adjusting xorg.conf to allocate the correct regions for each card for the next time that the X server is started.
My main concern is that my Intel 815 card is limited in resolution when an ati or radeon PCI card is added to the mix. With no card present, I can get the desired resolution.
With both cards present, I cannot get full resolution and the memory allocation of the cards is overlapping. I refer to gdm starting from videocard1 and then the first active display is videocard0. Then moving the mouse around eventually leads to an X server lockup and most probably the whole computer locks up.
I was surprised that someone running three video cards also sees a similar problem, but was able to get the proper results with FC1 w/ xfree86. Dual-display seems seriously broken now. I'm not sure if it was breakage or there were always problems with this feature.
Every now and then, FC3 does something unusual and unexpected; this morning, for example, it stopped listening to my USB devices for no good reason that I could see, and wouldn't start listening again until I rebooted. When these things happen, I repeat the mantra: "Fedora Core 3 is bleeding edge, Fedora Core 3 is bleeding edge". Even so, I still have fewer problems with FC3 than I do with my WinXP laptop.
I avoid XP as much as possible. I am not much for having to always be on gaurd for spyware, virus and intrusion detection software. These protections should be part of the OS and are enough of a distraction to keeps away from using it if not needed for some special purpose that is not yet possible while using a Linux distribution.
One thing that does suck is that I can't make the SMP version of the 2.6 kernel play with my dual-processor motherboard; I think, though, that this is a problem with the 2.6 kernel and my motherboard, not with FC3, since I had the same problem with SuSE.
I have not experienced dual-processors, but the smp kernel works fine on a multithreaded Processor that I use. In fact, this model desktop works great and has no hardware problems that I have noticed lately. It did have an X problem that was triggered by certain screensavers and caused X to completely crash, but leave residual infomation in the cards allocated memory (stuff on display before X crashed were present until the computer was rebooted). The problem was resolved mysterously with improvements in xorg-x11. These same improvements seemed to negatively effect another desktop that used earlier versions of similar video cards. Both the older and newer video cards seem to be unbroken now.
Now, why I like Fedora FC3:
- Most of my hardware is recognized and is reliable and functional.
- New ways to approach computing and keeping security a primary concern.
- and of course, because it is downloadable for free and not encumbered with proprietary software.
I love FC3 because of the strong user community surrounding it. Whenever I have a question I can post it here or to one of the other lists I belong to, and it will be answered. Sometimes sarcastically, but always answered. ;-) Plus, I can customize it any way I like; I didn't like FC's implementation of KDE, so I grabbed KDE from the KDE-Redhat project, and I haven't looked back. Installing my DVD drive was a piece of cake. Running FC3, my old dual-pro 866 MHz PIII works slicker and smoother and more reliably than my 1.2GHz PIV laptop running WinXP. There's almost nothing I can do in WinXP that I can't do in FC3. The only reason I keep Windows around at this point is so I can install audio books from audible.com onto my Creative Zen Nomad+ MP3 player (yes, I do have GNomad installed on my FC3 box, but the Audible.com manager desktop application does not exist for Linux... yet).
The Nomad player that I also own one is my only reason to use windows. It would be great if there was a linux OS that you could load on it and do away with the need for windows entirely. (was 20 gig, but is now 40 gig, changed disk and reloaded os)
I'm not a maniac about FC3; at home I also run an RH8 box and a Debian Woody laptop. At work, I maintain a server running FC2, a couple of Solaris boxes, and an old SunBlade 100 running Gentoo. My world is not all that narrow, though after only three years of playing with this stuff, I'm still a relative *nix newbie.
A good mixture of distros and hardware to become familiar with. I started playing with Minux, then later Linux (Slackware, then RHL 4.2) to become familiar with the Unix (Sun) operating system. I never touched a sun computer yet though.
Jim
-- Theory of Selective Supervision: The one time in the day that you lean back and relax is the one time the boss walks through the office.
