FC5 Step Backwards: WAS: Mostly off topic, Evolution question

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 14:18 -0600, karlp at ourldsfamily.com wrote:
> On Wed, April 26, 2006 10:47 am, Rick Stevens said:
> > On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 12:52 +0200, Andrew Kelly wrote:
> >> I have FC5 on a laptop, as well as the newest Ubuntu. I spent the last
> >> half year or so using FC4 exclusively and was pretty much very pleased
> >> with it all. FC5, however, seems nearly a step backwards and I'm not at
> >> all sure I want to use it much longer. But I'd like to keep it through a
> >> fair shakedown phase, maybe see if any coming updates brighten things
> >> up. Parallel, though, I'd like to test drive Ubuntu as a potential
> >> replacement. Right, nuff background.
> 
> snip
> 
> > What specific problems are you having with FC5?  I find it hard to
> > believe you consider it a "step backward".  Beyond some upgrade issues
> > with the installer, FC5 is pretty good.  There are a lot of inherent
> > differences "under the hood" between it and FC4, so perhaps you're still
> > trying to get used to those, but I'd hardly call it a step back.
> 
> I'm using it now and have found the enhancements are nice, like a gui
> updater/software installer, etc. One major drawback may be easier to solve,
> but it's a potential show-stopper: Gnome apps hang. I click on cancel, or OK
> and sometimes it that window just stops responding. Along with it, the menu
> bar at the top quits reacting. Sometimes it happens when I click on
> Applications, or System, etc. on the menu bar and it stops working.
> Gnome-terminal, if open, keeps working, but if I bring up a new window, it
> stays black and never shows a command prompt.

Hmmmm...interesting.  I'm not experiencing any of that.  I really
suspect a video driver issue here.  Have you tried refreshing X?  Try
"CTRL-ALT-F1" to get to a non-GUI console, then "ALT-F7" to go back to
GUI.  If that doesn't help, try restarting X.  You know, the old
"CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE" then logging in again.

> 
> The other show-stopper is Xorg itself. There's no option to probe a monitor
> or video card with FC5, so I have to guess settings based on inadequate
> manufacturer's docs.

Have you tried running "ddcprobe" or "X -probeonly"?  For example,
"ddcprobe" results in this on one of my machines:

[root at prophead ~]# ddcprobe

Videocard DDC probe results
Description:  Intel Corporation Intel(r)845G/845GL/845GE/845GV Graphics
Controller
Memory (MB):  7

Monitor DDC probe results
ID: PNR5780
Name: Planar PL170
Horizontal Sync (kHZ): 24-80
Vertical Sync (HZ)  : 49-75
Width (mm): 340
Height(mm): 270

It won't work on all monitors, but it does on a lot.

>  It also doesn't do Dual Head (another currently open
> thread) which I've struggled with...

Well, we don't know that yet.  Xorg says it does, and I believe them.
The Fedora list archives show others have it working as well.

> There's my 2 main complaints about FC5. Another minor one is that VMWare
> Workstation won't compile. I've switched to VMWare Server Beta, and it
> works, but I have to go through vmware-config.pl several times before it
> 'takes'. . .

Hmmm.  Does it work on FC4 under the same kernel?  FC4 and FC5's current
kernels are the same, 2.6.16-1.2096_FC[4|5]

> The last issue I can think of (I'm really on a roll, aren't I?) is USB
> usage. It works fine for my scanner; better than FC4 did actually, BUT Palm
> still doesn't work at all. I've not tried KDE, which I actually got to work
> ONCE with FC4... Enough yet? Stop...

Palm and Linux have always been problematical.  That being said, I've
gotten my old Handspring Prism, Tapwave Z2 and Tungsten E2 to work just
fine via both USB and bluetooth on both FC4 and FC5.  It does take a bit
of fiddling, but it works.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     If Bill Gates got a dime for every time Windows crashes...     -
-              ...oh, wait.  He does.  THAT explains it!             -
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