After months of running FC5 on my laptop, I finally upgraded my main machine. I’m usually fairly conservative about upgrades. In this case the driver was that Classpath needs some newer development libraries, and I wanted to be able to continue working on this machine instead of on my laptop. Also I plan to move my laptop to FC6 test 2 so that I can test out the cutting edge a bit better.
This upgrade (actually I reinstalled) went quite well. It had a few nits… pretty much the same things as last time.
One odd thing about waiting so long to do an install is that the initial yum update (first thing I run on a new OS install) is huge — in this case, a 600M download. I don’t think there’s anything to be done about this, it is just a fact of life. Still, this is so voluminous that it would almost make sense for me not to do a CD-based install (I already had the CDs… so this time it still did) and instead just install over the net.
After my big update the mirror lists seemed to stop working. I thought I read something about this, but I was lazy so I just disabled the mirrors and pushed forward.
I clicked the “developer” option in addition to whatever was selected by default. Unfortunately this missed a number of developer tools I actually use: eclipse, emacs (!), and I think x-chat. (The eclipse install, with all its dependencies, is ridiculously big. Maybe that is why it isn’t in by default. But there’s no excuse for Emacs!)
I also like to install some of the tools using gcj — azureus and rssowl. And I installed inkscape, since it is cool. Also I like to have the terminal in my nautilus menu, so I install nautilus-open-terminal (this approach is a pain, but I suppose that is the point).
Finally I had to build my own xchat-systray-integration from its SRPM (fixing a couple build buglets in the process). I don’t know why this isn’t just built in to x-chat, I find it indispensible. Likewise, for some reason mail-notification is not installed by default. This time, I remembered that and installed it, but not before I had logged in.. at least this time I didn’t switch to KDE like I did previously.
X started up with the wrong display type and resolution. Luckily I had remembered to save my old xorg.conf, so I was able to fix this up pretty quickly. X now seems to put my monitor into low-power mode after it is idle for a while. Great improvement!
My printer driver doesn’t exist — under FC4 I went through a multi-day struggle to get this printer working. I’m afraid to test it now. I forgot to back up this config file, so I’m thinking I will get to fight it all over again.
NetworkManager isn’t the default — a decision that most likely makes sense, given the wide variety of systems out there. (Perhaps it should be the default for laptops, I don’t know.) I enabled it, though, because I wanted an easy way to hook up to the VPN from my desktop. My old setup for this was rather painful. I exported my VPN configuration from the laptop and copied it to the desktop machine. It’s a pity it isn’t somehow simpler to preserve all this info. I suppose I ought to be doing upgrades and not clean installs.
My overall experience was quite good, much nicer than some of the other updates I’ve been through. We still seem to have trouble with some hardware, but that has long been a sore point for Linux in general.
There’s been a thread on the Fedora list lately about how Ubuntu is more user-focused; it arose due to an editorial. Perhaps we’d see more favorable comparisons if someone here went to outer space…
I suppose the fuss must really come down to a small number of concrete things: proprietary X drivers, proprietary wireless drivers, a live CD, and seamless upgrades.
For the driver issue I’m solidly in the Fedora camp, even though it has been personally painful. Andrew Overholt ended up shipping me a somewhat old pcmcia card so I could make my laptop go wireless again… the advice I got from other folks was to buy a card, but not a very new card. Silly!
As to a live CD and upgrades: we need those. I know the latter wasn’t historically popular in the RPM-based community. I never understood why, it seems like an obviously useful feature. By “upgrade” here (and confusingly, not elsewhere in this post) I mean a real Debian-style upgrade, where the system can be upgraded in place over the net via some yum command. (I did do this once but the experience was mixed and as I understand it this isn’t supported.)
Oh, dammit, I just realized today that I forgot to save my somewhat odd mail configuration. Next time I am going to upgrade (the anaconda way) rather than reinstall. I’m just incapable of remembering all the configuration bits.
3 Comments
Hey Tom, I was rebuilding xchat-systray-integration for a while until I started using xchat-gnome. It will actually read and — I believe — use any special xchat setups you already have, even though it doesn’t present the entire exhaustive (and exhausting) list of them through the interface. But one of the neatest things about xchat-gnome is that it gives you a nice systray icon that changes in a couple different ways to show you either new conversation, or new conversation directed at you specifically. It also raises libnotify type bubbles, and if it’s a private message the text of the message appears in the bubble. All you have to do to use this special mode is turn on the appropriate notification plugin, and change the notification level in GConf (I use gconf-editor) under apps/xchat/plugins/notification to 0. IIRC that was all there was to it. Have fun!
Updates should be much faster if FC were to use “delta RPMs” or “patch RPMs” as used by, say, SUSE. Look at the way Firefox 1.5 updates itself – automatically and by downloading just the binary diffs (considerably reducing the loads on their servers) – beautiful!
I would also like to rant about how software in Linux (and elsewhere) is rapidly becoming more and more bloated and how modern Linux distros like to stuff all sorts of random software into their installation in the name of “choice” exacerbating the bloat.
Paul — thanks! I will give xchat-gnome a whirl. I actually started it up the other
day but, you know, change is bad and I didn’t want to mess with a new UI. There’s
a sort of more general Linux problem here, which is discoverability. New things appear,
old things vanish, but I don’t always find out about it. In some cases (the mail
notification applet) it takes quite a while to discover the solution. Or, even for xchat-gnome,
the problem is apparent: I never would have thought to run edit gconf keys.
Ranjit: yeah, the RPM delta thing is kicked around on the Fedora list from time to time.
I don’t really follow those discussions. As to distro bloat — true. In most cases the choice
is a silly one. At the same time, Linux has an unusually high concentration of power
users, and those folks, I’d imagine, are probably prone to driving distro choice according
to finer points of package inclusion. Still, there’s a reason Ubuntu is not Debian…
Generally speaking I think Fedora is headed toward a “one good one” model,
where one canonical representative of a class is in core, and the others are
available only in extras.