F10 on Asus N10J netbook

[David A. De Graaf]

It's probably too late to matter, but here's my reaction to F10:



I've recently installed Fedora 10 Live onto my new Asus N10J-A2
netbook and am not happy with the experience.  I am very sad to see
the direction that Fedora is taking toward making it more Windows-like
and disregarding important *NIX precepts.  I especially deplore the
trend toward forcing use of Gnome instead of properly treating X as just
another utility that may or may not be useful.  I happen to dislike Gnome
and use XFCE in its place, but start it only when I deem it worthwhile.

Along with having Gnome rammed down our throats, comes the concealment
of valuable progress information during boot and shutdown.  What's the
use of that?  Can anyone say they prefer to be left with a blank
screen while important things are happening (or not happening)?
We have the new 'plymouth' system to thank.  The designers chose not
only to suppress the grub menu, but all the important [OK] or [FAIL]
messages as various system elements start, or fail to start.
Instead we see an animated logo, devoid of information content.

The Release Notes tell how to overcome this defective design -
Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf to comment out the 'hiddenmenu' line,
and change the kernel line to delete 'rhgb' and add 'vga=0x315'
as boot options.  Actually, the Notes advocate 0x318, which is invalid
on my machine,  however the error message is improved.  It now lists
the available VGA modes with an alphabetic label for immediate use,
but also with the proper hex code for addition to grub.conf. 
I customarily edit /etc/inittab to use init level 3 so I can see the
important startup messages and delay entering X until I'm ready.

The F10 bootup and login procedure is all very sanitary, very
Windows-like, and very free of information.  Is this good?
I think not.


The Gnomophiles on the design committee seem to have forgotten some
basic precepts of good system design.  An increasing number of
subsystems that have nothing whatever to do with a graphical interface
now have Gnome as a prerequisite.

With Fedora 9 we had the spectacle of pulseaudio which would start
only in Gnome, but not in XFCE4.  The complaints were loud due to the
frustration this engendered.  I managed to deduce a complex fix so
that any and all users could use the audio system, including the
ability to again play a sound in rc.local (run by root), and to have
sound capability in consoles and in XFCE4 and in Gnome.  This required
editing of the sacrosanct udev rules.  Now these rules are gone in
F10, and I haven't found where they went.

The Release Notes promise us a "Glitch-Free PulseAudio".
Sorry folks.  If anything, its worse.

The draconian permission restrictions, previously cryptically buried in
/etc/udev/rules.d, have now disappeared.  Therefore they cannot be fixed.
Empirically, if I invoke startx to run Gnome, sound can be produced.
If I invoke startxfce4 to run XFCE4 the sound system is silent.
If I install in rc.local the command  
    /usr/bin/aplay  /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav
no sound occurs at bootup to let me know it's ready to logon.

Pulseaudio is a system daemon that should be started by a script in
/etc/init.d just like other system services, so its capabilities are
available to all users at all times, without regard to whether X is
running or not.  The current design is unacceptable.

It's hopelessly frustrating.  
I understand this ill-considered design has made it nearly impossible for
blind users to log on.  It's merely inconvenient for me, since I enjoy
hearing an audible signal when the system is ready for me to log on.

Not having sound is certainly a showstopper for Fedora 10.

I've read about, but not experienced, the feature of NetworkManager
that requires a user to login before an encrypted wireless link will
connect.  I would really like to hear someone explain how a remote
machine, connected only by wireless, can successfully auto-reboot.
A wireless connection, encrypted or not, is an attribute of a system,
not a user.  Whether a user is logged in is irrelevant.  To require a
user to login first is an incredibly dumb design.


Here are some specific complaints:

1)  Now that I've managed to unsuppress the boot messages, the first
one seen is "Could not detect stabilization.  Waiting 10 seconds."
So the vaunted faster bootup has been defeated by some mysterious
failure on my Asus N10 netbook.

2)  The default Gnome login method, gdm, I think, now absolutely
forbids root to login.  Previously it merely warned that this
was a bad practice.  During installation you are strongly urged but
not compelled to create a regular user account.  I did not, because
that would conflict with the standard set of user accounts and user
IDs that I apply to all my machines.  I run a little script to create
all accounts in a standardized way.  The Fedora 10 guardians (nearly)
defeated me.  When installation finished and I rebooted I could not log
in, thanks to this newly stupid gdm restriction.

Fortunately, I remembered to switch to a console (CTL-ALT-F1), where
root was still allowed to login.  I ran my little script to add the
standard list of users and saved the day.

Have Linux users really grown too stupid to understand the admonition
not to log in as root (except when really necessary)?


Finally, here are some real improvements and benefits of Fedora 10:

1)  My Asus N10J netbook contains some new hardware that wasn't
well supported previously.  The RTL8111/8168B gigabit ethernet port
worked in F9 but not during installation.  Now it works fine.

2)  The wireless adapter, Atheros Comm device 002a (rev 01), which
includes 802.11 a/b/n, requires the new ath9k driver, which wasn't
available in F9.  It works perfectly.

3)  There's a builtin camera that seems to work perfectly with the
newly expanded support for cameras.  The 'cheese' program "just works",
displaying my handsome visage, albeit upside down and reversed.  There are
option settings to fix that, but no way to save them (that I've found).

4)  The sound system, with the caveats above, produces sound that's
barely audible.  But that's an improvment, because F9 didn't support
the sound card at all.

-- 
	David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
	dad at datix.us         www.datix.us