rawhide testing results

[Chuck Anderson]

Here's my comments on installing rawhide today.  I'll work on 
researching/opening bugs when I have more time.

Dell Optiplex GX620.  Radeon X600, two Dell 2001FP monitors whose 
native resolution is 1600x1200, connected via DVI.  I installed to a 
new LV created out of free space on an existing VG that was on an 
encrypted PV.  Otherwise I chose mostly defaults throughout the 
installer.

1. Anaconda font was too small.  It was hard to read the text.  It may 
be that the wrong resolution or DPI was chosen.  See also #2.

2. Default dual-head "clone" or "mirror" mode behaves strangely with 
KMS.  In Anaconda, the 2nd monitor didn't scale the image to fit the 
LCD, but the 1st monitor did.  When changing VT's back to X/Anaconda, 
the 2nd monitor no longer mirrored the 1st.  Instead, a frozen version 
of whatever the last text console contents were left behind on the 2nd 
monitor.

3. Lots of Anaconda warnings about unreadable partition tables for 
devices: ram0 - ram15, dm-0, loop0, etc.  Had to manually ignore all 
these warnings many times.

4. Anaconda warning about "unable to determine geometry of file/device 
/dev/loopX" for loop1 - loop7.  Had to manually ignore this many 
times.

5. Partitioning screen selections/data is cleared when starting to 
format the filesystems.  This is kinda scary since it leads you to 
believe that all your partitions/devices were deleted.  In actuality, 
everything is fine.

6. No UUIDs are shown on the Partitioning screen.  It would be nice to 
have these for when you are working with existing disks and you have 
an old fstab printed out on paper so you can match up the devices with 
the UUID= lines in the fstab.

7. initrd failed to decrypt root fs on bootup after installing.  This 
was fixed with a new mkinitrd: 

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=468856

8. After fixing #7, I get prompted for the password to unlock the PV 
(/dev/sda7 in this case).  Then I get prompted again, and again, etc. 
up to 4 or 5 times.  Each time I enter the correct password.  What is 
interesting is that the first time I'm asked (presumeably from the 
initrd) the font is different and it doesn't say which device I'm 
unlocking.  The other 4 times (presumably from the rc.sysinit) it says 
it needs to unlock /dev/sda7.  The system boots up fine after entering 
the correct password multiple times.

9. "telinit 3" keeps the keyboard in raw mode or something like that.  
Every key you hit prints a weird different character.  There is no way 
to log into the getty like this.  Had to reboot remotely from SSH.

10. Still need to create an xorg.conf file to do dual head because 
spare memory isn't reserved for the larger virtual resolution. 
System->Preferences->Hardware->Screen Resolution still fails to notify 
the user when xrandr fails because of this.  Uncheck "mirror", drag 
monitors side-by-side, click Apply, nothing happens.  Also, it's still 
hard to tell which monitor is which in the applet, even with the green 
and red identifying blocks, because in clone/mirror mode, both blocks 
are green!  Bad user interface experience.

11. After creating xorg.conf with virtual resolution to encompass 
3200x1200, dual-head mode doesn't really play nice with KMS.  Had lots 
of issues with the 2nd monitor going blank/off and not being turned on 
again, xrandr not configuring dual-head properly, etc.  Had to turn 
off KMS by adding "nomodeset" to grub.conf.

12. Metacity displays the window menu for each window on the left head 
no matter what.  For windows that are actually on the left head, 
everything works correctly.  For windows that are on the right head, 
the menu is disembodied from the window it belongs to, all by itself 
on the left head, usually at the far right edge of the left monitor. 
(my main monitor is on the right, left one is secondary).

That's it for now.