Just a few days before official Fedora 8 release, I’ve got chance to play around with latest Ubuntu 7.10 LiveCD. I really liked it, pretty much everything worked well out of the box, interface was nice and had some interesting features which I miss in Fedora. For the very first time in my ‘career’ as a Linux-user I was seriously tempted to install permanently different distro. But few days later Fedora 8 was released. First thing to test was F8 LiveCD, as downloading DVD image took longer while. And again, just like with Ubuntu, first boot impression was great! Everything worked straight away, nice look-and-feel, and generally dirty thoughts about cheating beloved Fedora with Gutsy Gibbon went far far away in a matter of seconds. ;)
As I have covered Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7 installation on my laptops already before, I’m not going to give very detailed description here, and focus mainly on issues I’ve ran into during installation and post-installation process.
Installation and first boot
Anaconda installer seems to be immortal. Same boring and not very flexible interface over and over again. I wonder when I would be able to - for example - configure my wireless adapter and maybe install some 3rd party device drivers manually during installation process, rather than after first boot..? Well, God knows. Installation process itself, however, went pretty smoothly and I haven’t noticed any glitch at all, on both computers. Well done. Btw, I did ‘fresh’ install, swiping out previous Fedora out of hard disk totally, but saving /home partition - obviously. I’ve also made a backup of whole /etc directory before F8 installation, which was pretty wise decision to make, as saved me a lot of time while restoring some system-wide settings after installation.
Anyway, first thing I’ve noticed during the very first boot-up, was - again (!) - machine trying pointlessly bring up wlan0 interface. Exactly the same issue as before, with Fedora 7. Who can tell me - what is the point of making wlan0 interface to connect during boot process, while installer gives absolutely no opportunity for user to configure that interface?! I can only tell, Fedora developers haven’t done their homework properly in that matter.
But this is not the end of wireless problems. I’ve expected to connect to the network straight away using NetworkManager - just like with LiveCD. But hey, surprise surprise - NetworkManager was down! Moreover - I couldn’t get it working at all. I could start/stop/restart it, but I never managed (up until this day) to get this little tray icon show up, so I could right-click it, and connect. I have no idea why is that, but this was great dissapointment for me…
Wireless
As I was forced to plug the network cable in, first thing to do was getting wireless adapter up and running. I have used good old FreshRPMs.net repository to get and install usual set of packages - dkms, dkms-ipw3945, ipw3945-firmware and ipw3945d. Surprisingly, after reboot wireless still didn’t work. Quick investigation in system log showed that iwl3945 driver was still present and loaded - along with ipw3945, so obviously wireless couldn’t work properly. To overcome that problem, I’ve had to blacklist iwl3945 driver within /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file. Following lines need to be added somewhere within that file:
blacklist iwl3945 blacklist mac80211
Then restart, and bang! - wireless working properly with ipw3945 drivers and wifi-radar. (I still can’t force NetworkManager to show this little icon, btw)
But hang on, what does this wlan0 weird thing doing here, instead of good old eth1 interface? As I’ve got pretty much used to eth1, I’ve found a solution. All you need to do is replace occurrence of wlan0 with eth1 in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file. Job done! :)
Compiz(-fusion) issues
First boot also showed problem with missing window decorations. Fortunately all I’ve had to do, was resetting compiz settings with following command:
[evad@dell620 ~]$ gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/compiz
Then, I’ve decided to give a go with that famous and fancy compiz-fusion effects. Although I’ve installed all compiz and compiz-fusion related packages, I just couldn’t get it working. I mean ’standard’ compiz effects were still present, but compiz-fusion features were missing. This time a friend of mine came up with a solution (although I don’t know where he got it from). Line #129 of /usr/bin/gnome-wm file needs to be changed:
Before:
OPT4=gconf
After:
OPT4=ccp
This fix works on both Intel and nVidia adapters. Btw, I recommend installing ccsm package from Fedora’s repository. This is CompizConfig Settings Manager, and holds an interface to configure loads of compiz(-fusion) effect plugins.
Unresolved issues (yet)
- Suspend doesn’t work on Dell Latitude D620 with nVidia card and nvidia drivers. Used to work with Fedora 7. I need to read about quirks, and test them later
- I can’t get office printer via Windows network working, although it used to work nicely with Fedora 7
- NetworkManager is still unusable for me - but I don’t mind, as I really like wifi-radar
- PulseAudio Server sometimes gets stuck and unusable after visiting websites with sound-enabled Flash animations
- I’d really like to cut the balls off the guy who invented that stupid keyring thing, and is forcing users to type extra password to check mail with Evolution
Final words
Although initial problems with wireless, and then little issues with desktop effects - generally I must say I’m really pleased with Fedora 8. I’ve managed to get my favourite system, applications and settings back up and running pretty quickly (I truly recommend backing up /etc dir ;). Of course, F8 still has few glitches, but on the other hand new release brings vast improvement in boot-up time. It’s so much faster now! Power management seems to be improved, as I can see my laptops are now consuming noticeably less energy while running on battery, which is really great. And finally, I can see some steps forward in terms of handling Bluetooth… Well, generally speaking - Fedora rocks! :D
