Experience with FC5 - what's your take?

[Kwan Lowe]

> I want to make the switch to FC5, but I keep seeing messages from people
> about problems with FC5.  It could just be me, but the frequency seems
> to be a lot higher than when FC4 came out.

Could be more people are using FC5 than FC4, or other things.
Personally, FC5 has been the easiest for me to install and configure. Not to say
that the previous ones were tough, just that the yum and createrepo seems to work a
lot better recently.

> At the moment I have a perfectly working FC4 system.  The only hangup is
> that my laptop doesn't suspend/resume, but then again, I haven't tried
> very hard to get it working. Still, I'm happy with FC4.

Alas, it's not a whole bunch better with FC5. I have a Dell 600M and E1505, plus a
Gateway MX3210. None of them sleep properly. I can see the ACPI lid/button events
and the shutdown scripts kick, but it doesn't quite suspend properly. The CPU stays
at high and won't throttle down, plus wireless doesn't completely shutoff.

> I'd call myself a very well experienced Linux user.  I'm confident I
> could iron out most any problems associated with doing the upgrade.
> But, I'm still hesitant.  So, can anyone convince me otherwise?  What's
> been your experience with FC5 so far?  Were you able to wipe everything
> and just keep /home intact (in the past I've had very wierd things
> happen when I've done this, so I've had to do selective restores when
> upgrading)?  Any issues that you just can't get rid of?  Has FC5 been
> stable?  VMware Workstation running okay (I know about the patches)?

I did clean installs, keeping only /home and a /export filesystem. I had to delete
the  desktop settings folders as it created extra icons. Othen than that, no real
issues. It has been completely stable both with the desktop/laptops and a couple
servers. VMWare workstation works fine, but I've been using Xen quite successfully
for the same purpose. There was a glitch with LVM hosing an entire physical volume,
but it hasn't occurred since.

-- 
* The Digital Hermit   http://www.digitalhermit.com
* Unix and Linux Solutions   kwan at digitalhermit.com