Anyone tried FC3-test1?

[Michael Hipp]

Net Llama! wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Michael Hipp wrote:
> 
>>Net Llama! wrote:
>>
>>>What kind of issues are you having with FC2?  I've not tried FC3-test1.
>>
>>- CD burning is largely broken. I can burn regular files but there is no
>>option to verify after the burn. I can't burn isos (via the gui anyway,
>>and the command for cdrecord that's supposed to work doesn't). Can't
>>copy CDs either.
> 
> 
> I know for a fact that all of that works for me, cause i've done all of
> those tasks on FC2.  Which tools are you using?

$ rpm -q nautilus-cd-burner
nautilus-cd-burner-2.6.0-2

I'm trying to do everything by the "standard out of the box" Fedora way. 
This, of course, means Gnome. I used KDE for a long time and really like 
its features but the sluggishness just became unbearable after a while.

I'm doing this so I can recommend Fedora more-or-less as-is. And that 
means I need to be well familiar with it in that way. Besides I really 
like the new Gnome. And I want to run a box that is as "stock" as 
possible to ease later upgrades and some of the chaotic variability that 
creeps in as I customize more and more.

But as you stated, much of my problems are Gnome related. Or perhaps 
FC2's implementation of Gnome.

>>- WM is broken. Doesn't give the proper hints to rdesktop to enable some
>>of its more useful features. This is a bad loss to those of us who must
>>remote admin lots of Win Server boxes.
> 
> 
> What is 'WM' ?

The Window Manager. Metacity, I presume. I'm getting this from the 
rdesktop man page that says it does certain screen things based upon 
"hints" from the WM. Those hints don't seem to exist in Metacity. But I 
don't know much beyond that.

>>- Can't autorun Mozilla & Mozilla Mail on startup. Putting them in the
>>usual autorun locations produces profile conflicts. Checking the 'Run
>>Mail & Newsgroups' in Moz preferences does nothing.
> 
> Which 'usual autorun locations' have you tried?  What kind of conflicts?
> Have you tried using ~/Desktop/Autostart ?  Whose mozilla build are you
> running?  Admittedly, i've never tried to autorun mozilla on startup, but
> i do run other things that work fine.

I'm running the stock Mozilla 1.7.2 that comes with Fedora. I tried 
rc.local and the gnome sessions thingee that is supposed to be the 
correct way to do autoruns. Haven't tried the Desktop approach. Note 
that they will autorun, but there seems to be no way around the profile 
conflict problem. The shell scripts that run mozilla-bin are supposed to 
handle such things and condense everything down to a single process 
instance, but it just does not seem to work.

>>- Window placement out of the WM is really annoying. It seems to want to
>>open everything in the upper left.
> 
> 
> I assume WM = window manager?  This works fine for me with XFCE.

There's probably somewhere to change it. But it isn't in the 
Settings/Preferences stuff and it isn't in REGEDIT (oops, Configuration 
Editor).

>>- And I'm ignoring for now, the fatal partitioning bug and the fact that
>>the amd_64 version wouldn't install with more than 256M of memory (easy
>>workaround once known by adding mem=256M to the boot line, but very
>>annoying to get all the way through setup 3 times only to crash at the
>>very end).
> 
> 
> I wish i had an amd64 cpu to test this on  ;)

It screams. And really not so expensive compared to any other moderately 
up-to-date system. I've also learned that the amd_64 is actually far 
less power hungry and hot-running than a comparable P4. So it is much 
easier to build a quiet system (fewer, slower fans). Quiet is good. Me 
want quiet.

>>These may all be relatively little things taken by themselves, but as a
>>whole it's adding up to an experience of every time I delve deeper into
>>some new area I always find it doesn't work as expected. And it
>>definitely means I can't recommend it to the many newbies asking "which
>>distro" or "I wanna try Linux".
> 
> 
> Yea, that's understandable.  I think alot of those issues might be
> reesolved by not using Gnome, but granted you shouldn't have to resort to
> that.

Yes. And I definitely can't recommend switching desktops to a newbie. My 
operating theory is that things ought to work out of the box pretty much 
as expected and only when you're ready to do something different then 
should you expect have to do some work to make it happen.

>>Worst part is, I've filed bugzilla reports on some of these and added to
>>the "me too" chorus on others, but I don't see any evidence that
>>RH/Fedora is addressing them. So I'm assuming (hoping?) their way of
>>fixing them is by releasing FC3. I'm on the amd_64 version and I don't
>>know how many of these are specific to same.
> 
> 
> That's not my understanding of how the Fedora development process works.
> If the bugzilla bug isn't updated, then the bug isn't going to be fixed
> unless the primary developers happen to fix it on their end and Fedora
> just upgrades to the fixed version.

Thanks for the thoughts,
Michael