FC6 through the rear view mirror

[Les]

On Sun, 2007-02-04 at 15:47 -0600, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> I have found FC6 to be the least installable of all the Fedoras.
> That is my conclusion but first some caveats. I am trying to run it on a
> year 2000 Dell Optiplex GX1p. This machine ran FCx (x<6) with minimum
> problems. It is an old machine but FC6  has given me more serious
> trouble with the installation than and other Fedoras.
> 
> On the bright side it has been a learning experience but I am full of
> anxiety as to what will happen with FC7. There is something wrong with
> its construction and let me list some of the more serious problems.
> Maybe it is only with older machines but I have seen others having
> similar problems.
> 
> 1. shutdown would not turn off the machine. Finally fixed with 4 months
> of hitting my head against the wall.
> 
> 2. The system did not recognize my sound card. It showed up in the early
> boot messages but then it was lost. lspci did not list it, and it did
> not show up in modprobe.conf and when the appropriate lines were put in
> the file they were  ignored. Again after much turmoil the modprobe had
> to be run in rc.local.
> 
> 3. Once sound was enabled use of sound was ephemeral. With updates, CD
> playing which worked stopped working.
> 
> 4. Getting various video and audio sources to play also came and went.
> 
> 5. firefox configuration to use plugins properly was especially
> confusing and tedious.
> 
> 6. Using system-config-httpd to configure the web server does not really
> work and caused me the hidden problem of ending up with two Listen
> commands in the configuration files which took a while to trouble shoot.
> 
> 7. And today's special, rpm's that are removed by yum erase for
> dependencies are not re-installed with a yum install
> 
> There were other things but these were the biggies. Now I ma not trying
> to start a rant and for people to say it worked for me is not helpful.
> What was helpful in getting things to work was advice I received from
> people on the list. Again all this worked fairly well in previous
> Fedoras on this machine so I can't really blame the machine.
> I am not bitter I just want the installation process to be smoother and
> for it to work as it has previously.
> -- 
Hi, Aaron,
	I would like to add the inability to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 without a
lot of issues because I had upgraded my system continuously.  The
breaking of mplayer and disassociation of plugins that occured 3 times
(and I have not yet resolved the latest one).  And I have a condition
that bugs me with Firefox and certain movie files, whereby the files do
not play correctly, and I have been unable to figure out where to look
for error messages or information that would give me some clue as to
what needed to be fixed.  This left me trying various things suggested
by various people on the list (some direct replies as well as the
archived emails), and while this may be my fault for not reading some
document, I don't know the document to read or I would have read it.

	Finally the whole business of not supporting some types of codecs needs
to be looked at in some fashion to make the finding and installation of
the non-fedora or proprietary codecs simpler.  I did see that there is
some agreement by other Linux folks that this is needed, and so the new
"we will write Linux drivers for you" movement is being born (a very
good and beneficial thing in my opinion).  But I would like some
docuementation on using windows decoders or other equivalent plugin type
software on Linux.  If it exists, I am sorry, but I haven't seen it yet.

	Overall, the installation went painlessly, but the kitting up for use
is painful, slow, and beyond most folks abilities at this point.  That
surely needs to be addressed, although I am not sure how.  On the good
side, I just loaded Fedora 6 on my bigger system and it went pretty
smoothly, including the 213 updates.  Only question I have is why the
updates.  I grabbed the latest version I could find (dated 10-26-2006),
and I thought it was supposed to have all the updates in it already.  It
took me about 18 hours over dsl to get the DVD iso and then to install
the updates.  I admit that I am not sophisticated in this, but I am also
not stupid (well maybe a little bit???) Anyway, it is painful and
ofcourse there is that small matter of the one site I cannot use.  I
guess I will have to find another provider for that service.  I am
committed to Linux, and so far, even with the issues above I like the
look and feel of Fedora.  I am looking forward to FC7 or whatever it is
going to be called (please don't loose the revision number, we need to
keep track of where we are!).

Regards,
Les H