F-12 upgrade experience with Dell D630

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 13:31 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> As the Dell Latitude D630 is one of the more common devices that smolt
> >>> reports being used by Fedora I thought I'd mention my upgrade
> >>> experience and issues for F-12.
> >>>
> >>> Probably the two usual things that people query are grahics and wifi.
> >>> The model I have has the Intel IWL-4965AGN device which as expected
> >>> works fine.
> >>>
> >>> I'm having a few issues with the nouveau driver with plymouth in that
> >>> it doesn't work at all but if I remove all the options from the kernel
> >>> boot line it gets to X and apart from some initial corruption as GDM
> >>> comes up its OK from there. I have no idea how to debug this.
> >>
> >> Try adding the parameter 'nomodeset' instead of removing any parameters.
> >> What happens then?
> >
> > It has certainly improved it. I wasn't in front of the machine as it
> > booted this morning so I'll need to check out plymouth this evening
> > but the responsiveness of the display is improved and I don't get
> > duplicate mouse pointers now. The performance seems reduced compared
> > to F-11 though :-(
> >
> >>> Probably the most annoying is the breakage of sound. This seems to
> >>> have every other kernel/alsa/pulseaudio update and was an issue on and
> >>> off right through F-11 as well so its not exactly surprising but also
> >>> disappointing that one of the most common devices running Fedora has
> >>> sound broken on a semi regular basis. Again some pointers in debugging
> >>> this so it can be fixed by F-12 final would be great.
> >>
> >> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bug_info_kernel_sound
> >>
> >>> The only other very minor issue I see is that the icon spacing on the
> >>> gnome panels is massive!
> >>
> >> This is currently being 'enthusiastically' discussed on
> >> fedora-desktop-list. :)
> >
> > Thanks for the pointer. I noticed its also been tweaked in todays rawhide.
> >
> > I've also noticed of late that yum performance has gone through the floor too.
> 
> I never finished that. Its currently necking one core of a 2.5 ghz
> penryn and using nearly a gig of RAM. It literally now takes hours to
> update my Fit-PC (500mhz geode with 256Mb RAM).

Geode GX2/500 has basically zero cache (either L1 or L2), and 256MB is
really the bare minimum for the install/upgrade process.  You'll be
swapping to disk a lot during the upgrade while the depsolving goes on,
and yeah, it'll take quite a while.

Dan