For the last few Fedora Linux releases, I've been upgrading to a prerelease version a week or so before the actual release in anticipation of the real thing, and commenting here on what I saw. I did upgrade this time as well (a month ago), but skipped the commentary. A few belated notes, since this extended holiday gives me not just the time but also the itch to play with stuff. One big complaint, a few notable incremental improvements, and a few notes to self:

Starting with the complaint: Evolution, my long-time favorite desktop email application, has turned really annoying. Primarily because a rewrite of its on-disk message summary to use SQLite broke not just the one feature that converted me to an Evolution user in the first place ("vfolders", aka persistent, updating search folders), but every resemblance of a sensible mailbox behavior. It reorders messages in what might as well be a random order every time you delete one! Crazy. And peeking beneath the bonnet reveals that whoever wrote this doesn't have the first clue about how SQL-based relational structures work: every IMAP folder has its own table in the SQLite database with the exact same structure! Jeez, someone needs to read their database normalization guidelines again. I'm sorry, but not even free software gets to fuck up this badly. So, because downgrading to the last-good version (2.22) seemed like too much pain (given all the libraries it depends on were updated anyway), I switched to Thunderbird. I don't particularly like T-Bird, it's slow and clunky, but at least it doesn't block me from actually doing something with my email. Thank universe for IMAP and pretty good webmail apps (GMail and Zimbra) for making that switch smooth..

OpenOffice 3.0 was a very welcome upgrade, for the single reason that it supports OpenXML documents. Again, not really because I'd like to deal with 'OpenXML' documents, but because it's way more convenient to be able to deal with them than to try to make the few people who send those around understand that not everyone else in the world is in love with Office 2007.

Upgrade had a few scary gotchas. One which might hit quite a few people I saw a couple of weeks later upgrading another computer online with Anaconda: it would have been really smooth, save for the bit where the preupgrade program that downloaded F10 to a bootable image failed to pick a kernel package to the upgrade batch because F9's kernel was already at that time more recent than the F10 kernel. Once I figured out what caused that machine to crash during the reboot phase of the upgrade, it was easy to fix by downloading a kernel package into the upgrade batch manually, but the Python stack trace that showed up as would probably be unresolvable to 90% of Linux users, or 99.9% of the target population of most modern Linux distros -- never mind that Fedora and its bleeding-edge software probably still is a release for the more hacker minded.

The more scary gotcha hit me on my primary machine, though, one on which I've for a very, very long time used LVM snapshots as a backup and 'oops, that was a mistake, lets go back to yesterday' recovery facility by having two snapshots of the root filesystem available to me. This used to be fine, because Fedora was happy to refer to the FS by its LVM volume name, and because LVM's own bookkeeping facilities kept track of which volume is the "primary". However, as a throwback to a mistaken volume management feature from a few years back, F10 decided to convert all volumes to refer to each other via their filesystem UUIDs. Now, I agree that UUID (or the earlier convention of filesystem labels) reference is MUCH better that device names, given that disks may be plugged to different interfaces etc. However:

  1. LVM already had taken care of this and provides logical names for volumes that are independent of their underlying physical devices.
  2. Unlike LVM, the mount and fsck utilities apparently can't distinguish between the master volume and its snapshots, picking anything at random or everything at once.

The result: first, the machine failed to find a root filesystem at all. Getting that fixed, it would then proceed to crash in fsck because the snapshots were read-only. As far as I can tell at this point, I have three avenues available to myself: stop using snapshots as a backup facility (and go back to what?), manually fix the kernel init scripts and mount-points after every kernel upgrade (not such a big deal, except the kernel updates come every week or so), or become a Fedora developer and try to convince whoever came up with this idea that LVM had solved it already and it needs to be forgotten about. Given that I have this kind of time available for this stuff about once a year, I'm afraid I might end up giving up backups.

So, that's the complaints out of the way. Otherwise, F10 and GNOME 2.24 is another solid release, and aside of those rather bad glitches, the other stuff keeps on improving on the "make it just work" road. Now that zero-configuration X seems to pretty much work (see below), I'm curious to see where this kernel mode setting etc stuff develops to in the next six months.. Also, I finally had to learn how to use KVM and virt-manager because VMware Player broke in the upgrade. Had to give up copy-pasting between the host and the VM since I don't know of a working KVM-clipboard utility for Windows, but given how little I need virtual machines for (quickly testing some apps, primarily), that was no big loss to me.

And speaking of zero-conf X, one thing I finally got around to figure out was how to change the laptop's touchpad settings without having an xorg.conf: apparently it's done via an FDI file for HAL instead.