Fedora 11 will be amazing, but these issues need to be discussed -

manualqr · #1 27th January 2009, 03:40 AM

I've been a Fedora user for less than two weeks, and the entire project is blowing me away. I like how Fedora contributes so much to the growth of good software, the power the distribution gives its users, and that it's relatively low-maintenance (coming from Arch).

I installed rawhide, and it looks awesome so far. Here's what I anticipate;
> default ext4 and other general updates

> faster boots (even with most services and autostarts disabled, Windows boots significantly faster than Fedora 11 on my Toshiba laptop)

> reverting back to xorg.conf, as X wont take my synaptics modifications (it prefers autodetecting, which makes my screen flicker 10 different times before gdm turns on, sheesh!)

> A yum feature that suggests packages to remove;
-- ideally, it would be based on dependency trees. if a package is not part of the core install and hasn't been used in 1 month, isn't it safe to suggest that it should be removed?
-- e.g: End-user installs Banshee, but later decides to install Amarok. Banshee is un-installed, but many mono packages (the large amount of documentation, and for some reason the Boo programming language) remain on the hard-drive. these packages are updated by yum, and over time, they waste repo bandwith and disk space.
-- apt (under Ubuntu) has a working, if erratic implementation of this. I think Fedora would benefit from it.

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> though not directly a Fedora issue, it saddens me to see that Gnome loads slower and that few default Gnome apps are a bit buggy (SoundJuicer being the main one). I'm using 2.25.5, so I'm hoping that 2.26.x will boost performance.

> another non-fedora issue: cpu scaling (using the gnome interface) is completely broken (always was on my laptop). There is no interface to manually change screen brightness, cpu power, or fan speed. Toshiba offers a nice applet (Windows, of course) that can modify these and save the settings in different profiles. KPowersave is a step in the right direction, but KDE4 has ditched it in favor of the crappy guidance power manager =/

Linux battery life on minimal power settings is 1hour 10 minutes (wifi on). It's around 2 hours 50 minutes on Windows, so we've got quite a bit of catching up to do as a "green" OS.

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On a more selfish note, Brother has shipped working drivers for my MFC printer so once the battery life issue is fixed I'm going all Fedora on this laptop :D

***Dan*** · #2 27th January 2009, 03:48 AM

Evening.

These are some interesting observations. I'm not sure I agree with all of them, but that's what makes a horse race. <..

..>

A discussion here is in order, but don't let it stop there. Please also take these ideas to the fedora project communication page and offer the suggestions there. We are a user supporting user forum. True, we have talked a few developers into glancing through this particular forum, but there's no replacement for direct communication.

Here's the communication page link. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate

Carry on!

#3 27th January 2009, 03:50 AM

To remove Mono completely is simple:

yum remove libgdiplus

Job done!

Wayne

#4 27th January 2009, 04:19 AM

Fedora11 Alpha isnt really even out so i dont think you can really make any judgements on it as of yet till its out the door

manualqr · #5 27th January 2009, 04:44 AM

Thank you, Wayne for the Mono tip.
It doesn't really solve the overall problem I mentioned though..

I'm not trying to judge Fedora 11 at all, I just want to debate (too strong, more like mull) these topics over with anyone who's interested.

I will try and put something up in Bugzilla if my suggestions get any interest here..

All of that aside;
Does anyone have strong feelings against xorg.conf based Xorg or leftover/junk package cleaning option?

RahulSundaram · #6 27th January 2009, 11:03 AM

HI,

If Xorg auto-detection doesn't work in some cases, the long term solution isn't to revert back to manual fiddling but help fix it. You can file a bug report in http://bugzilla.redhat.com against the driver and provide the Xorg log from /var/log.

Yum reverse dependency removal of leaf packages is work in progress. There is a plugin that does this already but doesn't work perfectly yet and is not gong to be the default till it is tested well. Meanwhile package-cleanup command can help you.

If you install from the live cd, there is no mono packages by default

For cpu frequency issue, again a bug report would be good.

vallimar · #7 27th January 2009, 03:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by manualqr

Thank you, Wayne for the Mono tip.
It doesn't really solve the overall problem I mentioned though..

Try: package-cleanup --leaves
It's not great, exhaustive or foolproof, but it's probably the closest you'll get
with the current rpm setup. I don't recall if it's part of yum or yum-utils.

manualqr · #8 27th January 2009, 05:10 PM

Cool!
I'm glad to hear that a dependency removal feature is being implemented.

On a side note, package-cleanup is a part of yum-utils.
I ran it on Fedora 10 when I got rid of Banshee, but no mono/boo packages were removed.
Yes, I understand that there are other ways to get rid of Mono, but I believe there is a need to have a uniform solution to this issue.

As per filing bug reports on battery life, take a look at this;
1) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=469568 (actual: 10% down in 2 mins, expected: 10% down in 30 mins)
2) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479322
3) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=480196

Getting Xorg issues fixed is tricky too..
Fedora doesn't provide an "intel" package, we just get xorg-x11-drv-i810. Even the Intel devs say the i810 driver is beyond deprecated

, why would we put that in our repos? Every time Xorg starts, the screen flickers on and off several times and then settles down. Fedora 10 had good synaptics defaults, so I didn't mind the flickering too much then. The rawhide default disables tap to click, and Xorg refuses to read a xorg.conf file I crafted manually. Bug report it is!

manualqr · #9 27th January 2009, 05:17 PM

Does Fedora provide gkrellm, gkrellm-plugins, or powermgr?

Powermgr in particular looks very promising.

RahulSundaram · #10 27th January 2009, 06:48 PM

Hi,

i810 despite the package name is the latest Intel Xorg driver. Red Hat is among (if not the ) largest Xorg contributors and is not shipping something old. You just need to file bug reports if something that doesn't work.

use yum search or yum info to look up packages in the repository.

manualqr · #11 28th January 2009, 08:50 PM

I filed a bug report about gnome-power-manager and low battery life in general, and I was told that it's kernel issue. The suggestion was to unload kernel modules, but I've already removed lots of them.
Apparently there has been plenty of discussion about adding profiles-based power management as well, but no action!

I filed another on faulty CD-ROM mounting ("cannot find /dev/sr0"), and am about to file one about Xorg ignoring vertical & horizontal scrolling even though it is enabled.

@RahulSundaram: I had no idea that RedHat contributed to Xorg as well, thanks for the info.

powermgr et al. aren't in Fedora repos, probably because the code is very old..

F.User_4_Life · #12 28th January 2009, 09:21 PM

im a kde user not a gnome user so not only does gnome have issues so does kde as well as xfrce no distro will work perfectly unless desighn your from scratch.

heres is one of my problems screenlets has some problems starting up and keeping the mini apps in the same spot as i have left them.
another is that in the plasma bar in system tray items loose teh color of the bar and either go completely black or white i know its in the scripting of each app cause they are not .png images its a give in.
superkaramba needs to have composite enabled. for those who have lower vid mem its a pain to use them.
when running compiz fusion the plasma bar has a window deco around it and you can grab it and move it around the whole screen. not sure why but it does for me so i dont use compiz i use the default composite in system settings under desktop icon.
i dont have video problems what so ever i have a mas of 2 gigs vid mem sli mode lmao
problems with wine when i try to install some games they dont work i dont care really its just another problem i have.
none of the problems consist of fedora its self there all realated to other things and apps its the coders job to deal with it for each app. but as for the problems i dont really have a beef with them.

another one is that urban terror does not download new maps for me i know it has to deal with the libcurl stuff but i have no clue on where to start on and or how to fix that problem so i just copy maps onto a prtable hdd and transfer the maps to my linux from my mom or sisters pc. i.e. windows, lmao

how to sli i have a thread just do a search for sli and it has a smily face next to the post and here is the link

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http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...&highlight=sli

manualqr · #13 28th January 2009, 09:53 PM

One thing that was annoying to me when I used Fedora 10 KDE was that Fedora-specific apps were written in Gtk. Someone ambitious should work on gtk2Qt

, that would be an interesting project!

RahulSundaram · #14 28th January 2009, 10:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by manualqr

@RahulSundaram: I had no idea that RedHat contributed to Xorg as well, thanks for the info.

Then, you might want to read

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions

leigh123linux · #15 28th January 2009, 10:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by F.User_4_Life

im a kde user not a gnome user so not only does gnome have issues so does kde as well as xfrce no distro will work perfectly unless desighn your from scratch.

heres is one of my problems screenlets has some problems starting up and keeping the mini apps in the same spot as i have left them.
another is that in the plasma bar in system tray items loose teh color of the bar and either go completely black or white i know its in the scripting of each app cause they are not .png images its a give in.
superkaramba needs to have composite enabled. for those who have lower vid mem its a pain to use them.
when running compiz fusion the plasma bar has a window deco around it and you can grab it and move it around the whole screen. not sure why but it does for me so i dont use compiz i use the default composite in system settings under desktop icon.
i dont have video problems what so ever i have a mas of 2 gigs vid mem sli mode lmao
problems with wine when i try to install some games they dont work i dont care really its just another problem i have.
none of the problems consist of fedora its self there all realated to other things and apps its the coders job to deal with it for each app. but as for the problems i dont really have a beef with them.

another one is that urban terror does not download new maps for me i know it has to deal with the libcurl stuff but i have no clue on where to start on and or how to fix that problem so i just copy maps onto a prtable hdd and transfer the maps to my linux from my mom or sisters pc. i.e. windows, lmao

how to sli i have a thread just do a search for sli and it has a smily face next to the post and here is the link

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...&highlight=sli

Screenlets isn't a fedora package , it's from the compiz-fusion repo .
It is a dead project and was still in at the developmental stage ( so it is unlikely to be fixed )

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=429486