Roo wrote:
1. Downloaded the DVD ISO, burnt it and began the installation
Sounds good.
2. Anaconda starts and BY DEFAULT, selects the option for a fresh install
rather than upgrade... despite this machine very clearly being a fully
functioning FC5 install. Nice... someone not paying attention would be in
for a shock
Actually unless you select to format the partitions (let's face it, you
have to not merely not be paying attention...), the last time I did this
"install" it did not nuke the existing filesystem contents, except the
stuff that it overwrote from the packages. So I think this may be a
non-problem.
3. Anaconda then says that it is analysing dependencies... for nearly 25
minutes. I understand that the installer is now based on YUM... so this
extreme slowness is only to be expected. I then get to watch it upgrading
for another 2 hours... yep, that's a YUM install for you
Was your HDD on the go? Ctrl-Alt-F2 in Anaconda gets you a shell
prompt, I saw on a 384MB box that it had committed 100MB of swap during
install, slowing it to a crawl. Yes the global package update eats too
much memory, whether that is rpm libs (I think it is) or yum I don't know.
4. I try to re-install my NVIDIA drivers... only to be told that it cannot
find the kernel source. However, that appears to be installed. After 2
more hours of fruitless messing around, I spot that fedora core 6 has, for
whatever deranged reason, decided to install kernel-devel packages for
i686, and the kernel itself is i586. rpm -ivh --force
dvd/kernel-blah-blah-.i686.rpm fixes it... and it now works.
Yes it is broken to install i586 but mismatching the -devel. Oh well.
I was tracking FC6 yumming from the Development repo. I don't feel I
can complain since I didn't bang on anaconda. If I had tested anaconda
before release I might feel a little bit grumpier. Stuff happens.
5. Run tremulous to find that for some unknown reason, the interface is
now very very dark. No settings have changed between running it
under FC5 last night and running it under FC6 today. Brightness slider is
at max too. Oh well, just another in the usual huge list of breakages that
go with running a Red Hat alpha test version of their forthcoming RHEL...
eh. Oops... shouldn't say that, should I.
Ah steady on, you are running the nVidia binary, you have xorg 7.1 now,
as you say it is for some "unknown reason". You can't get to beating up
RHAT from there.
6. XMMS doesn't work.
Well this isn't helpful whatever way you cut it. segfaults? no MP3
support? can't open the audio device? It's actually an ALSA problem?
This is the kind of thing the mailing list can help with given something
to get teeth into.
7. Decide to try out the supposedly spiffy new desktop effects. Selecting
foot menu -> System -> Preferences -> desktop effects... and yes, all my
window borders disappear, but don't come back, so I can't change Windows
or do anything really. Strangely the bottom GNOME panel works, and I can
switch desktops. My slide-out side panel selector doesn't work.
I don't know about Gnome, but it sounds your Window Manager crashed.
What I would do is run desktop-effects from a root Konsole or whatever
it is in Gnome and look for stdout, it is quite chatty. The nVidia
binary blob isn't supported or tested to work with it for reasons you
probably know. FWIW on this Intel chipset laptop, compiz is working great.
Oh well... lucky for me that I got fed up with SELinux under FC5 and
disabled it completely, or I'd no doubt have about 30 or 40 other nasty
breakages and stuff that "JUST DOESN'T WORK" (tm). Still... GTK can't be
any slower and memory hungry under FC6 than it was under FC5, can it? I
suppose I'll find out.
Hum well SELinux is a feature, not a bug. Thing is you feel all the
pain upfront, and you don't feel the lack of pain when you are not
hacked by the next scripted attack that you are open to. The policies
have gotten a LOT better at avoiding trouble for all common usage
scenarios that I found, and there is a new IDE for policies coming too.
First move for SELinux grief nowadays should be
touch /.autorelabel
and reboot.
-Andy
