Announcing Fedora 12 Alpha

[David L]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Jesse Keating wrote:
> <insert witty comment that I'm up far too early to generate myself here>
>
> Fedora 12 "Constantine" Alpha release is available! What's next for the
> free operating system that shows off the best new technology of
> tomorrow? You can see the future now at:
>
<snip>
> We need your help to make Fedora 12 the best release yet, so please take
> a moment of your time to download and try out the Alpha and make sure
> the things that are important to you are working. If you find a bug,
> please report it - every bug you uncover is a chance to improve the
> experience for millions of Fedora users worldwide. Together, we can make
> Fedora a rock-solid distribution.
>

I tried out the F12 Alpha Live USB on two systems, an IBM thinkpad
and a Dell Precision desktop (both with ATI).

On the thinkpad, the graphics was a bit garbled.  The f11 smolt
profile for that system is here:

http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_2c5ae01e-2458-4117-8e8d-1156d68c3815


On the Dell, the graphics looked OK, but the system hung in a
manner consistent with what I've seen with graphics driver bugs.
(unresponsive keyboard and mouse... had to power cycle).
The graphics chip for this system was:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV370 5B64 [FireGL
V3100 (PCIE)] (rev 80)

After power cycling, the Live USB wouldn't boot ... instead, I got
this message:

mknod: `/dev/mapper/control': File exists
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
Bug in initramfs /init detected.  Dropping to a shell.  Good luck!

bash: no job control in this shell
bash-4.0#


I should mention that I did a yum update before the crash.
Incidentally, I noticed there were a lot of updates and I didn't
see any delta rpms although I might have missed that.

The only other problem I noticed in my limited testing before
the crash was that NetworkManager pptp vpn didn't work for me.
I'm pretty sure I had it configured identically to f11 where it does
work.


             David