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:
- LVM already had taken care of this and provides logical names for volumes
that are independent of their underlying physical devices.
- 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.
