Traces of Martin’s State

Okay, so I updated my Dell Latitude X1 to Fedora 8. I downloaded the DVD ISO, and installed from the external DVD drive. I wiped out the partitions / (root), /boot and swap, and kept my /home partition. (Ie. I did not “upgrade” but did a “fresh” install).

I must say, the upgrade did NOT go without problems:

• First, I thought the system stalled even before the installer started, but it turned out it was just frozen for a while. Fair enough.
• The post installation process did NOT show up during first boot.
• Therefore, I logged in as root in X and created my normal user account. That didn’t work out, and the “user and groups” program froze. I was not able to log in as the normal user in the text console. I got the message No such directory: /home/gronslet, even though the directory existed and was owned my me, uid=gid=500. I ended up with moving the whole dir away, deleting the user, rebooted several times, and then:
• The third time I rebooted, the post install process kicked in. Luckily, I had moved my homedir away, and was able to create a new user that got uid=gid=500 during that process. I then logged in as root and moved my homedir back in place. Phew.
• I only installed KDE and not GNOME. The default mouse cursor is set back to the old static black hourglass, and not the cool swirling blue thing that was default in Fedora 7. Why is there always something that is not polished for KDE only users?
• KNetworkManager does not yet exist for Fedora 8. More info here. (The current knetworkmanager package is nothing but a small script that calls nm-applet, which does work with my WPA2 encrypted wireless network by the way. But it looks ugly in KDE, and I can not log into Gnome and change the dull UI theme.)
• GNU/Linux users usually complain alot about how Microsoft Windows just connects to the net and starts downloading updates without you asking for it. Fedora 8 has yum-updatesd running as default, which does exactly this. Stop it: service yum-updatesd stop and disable it with setup. Or use your favorite GUI program for both those tasks.

A little plus to KDE: For the first time, since Redhat 9, KDE did not reset my time preferences to UK style (am/pm) in the transition to a new version. Yay. I use the 24-hour clock.

I set SELinux to permissive mode, and added selinux=0 as a kernel paramater to /etc/grub.conf. There are too many other things that can go wrong for me to struggle with selinux. Of course, this is not something I recommend or anything.

A few other notes:

• KPowerSave is installed and working. However, the “Powersave” CPU Frequency Profile is not available unless it is modprobed: modprobe cpufreq_powersave will fix it. (Same tweak as in F7)
• Beryl and Compiz are merged into Compiz-fusion which is installed as default and can be activated fromthe K-menu: Settings/Desktop Effects. Nice.

Enough for now, more might come. As usual, I plan a F8 page for the Dell X1. When it comes, you will find it here.

You can read some thoughts about Fedora’s Gnome centricness on liquidat’s blog.
Aravind Sheshadri also had some rough seas during upgrade (he also kept his old /home partition)

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 00:05:04 and is filed under GNU/Linux [in English]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.