Bye Fedora

I’m going to say goodbye to my current Fedora 12 laptop; yes the one for which I wrote that post about Fedora 10 at the time which I then updated for Fedora 11. This is not because the laptop broke down, but rather because I ended up getting my MacBook Pro fixed, and that is again my main laptop. While I did want to have a laptop running Linux to the side of the MBP running Mac OS X, I finally decided it’s pretty pointless for me.

There are multiple reasons for that, some have nothing to do with Fedora, but a few have. Marginally maybe, but they have. The first problem is, once again, the video card. While it’s not like it has been easy with Yamato’s new one I got to say that two and a half months later I’m definitely glad I got it: KMS with 2.6.32 (and GIT userland — need to check whether that’s still needed, but I guess so for a while still) works like a charm, I’m able to use compiz without a glitch, it’s perfectly stable. With the nVidia on-board card of that laptop, it’s a totally different story. The nvidia binary driver for that card is not (yet?) available for Fedora 12, and the nouveau driver is… useless. It’s not just a matter of lacking 3D acceleration, but it’s also totally broken for suspension, which worked fine at least with the proprietary driver instead.

But it goes beyond the hardware support; probably you have all heard about the thunderstorm around Fedora’s original decision to allow any user with console access to install new packages without root password. I actually think that for Fedora’s target, that’s a pretty good move: it limits itself to installing and upgrading signed packages which has thus limited security implications, and it’s just a default. For most users, having console access is as good as having root’s password so it shouldn’t really matter; for desktop usage, that’s pretty much true already. Smarter, more security-paranoid users can easily change that setting. At any rate, the thunderstorm (or crapfest if you prefer) got them so much they changed the default again; too bad. Unfortunately, it seems instead that I got a different problem: my PackageKit interface is totally broken and I cannot use it at all; I got to use yum to upgrade my box which is definitely not so nice.

At first I thought it had to be related to either the fact that I upgraded from F11 or to my use of RPM Fusion but turns out that the PackageKit interface is as much broken on a box that a customer of mine set up for me to install a toolchain chroot for them last week. I ended up using yum there as well; no clue what the problem is with that.

And since I upgraded to F12 I found another problem as well: I already ranted about the fact that I couldn’t get bluetooth dial-up to work with my Nokia phone, and I had to use the cable to work it out; following Adam’s suggestion I also got the JoikuSpot application that turns the phone into an (ad-hoc) hotspot to use it via WLAN without configuring anything. The latter approach is, unfortunately, valid only if you’ve got the power adapter of your phone at hand, since it lasts about an hour on my E75; and the other day (at my customer’s office) I didn’t have it available. I had, though, the cable, left in the bag since the last time I used it, unfortunately when I tried to connect with that, exactly like I did in F11, NetworkManager decided to fail. And of course neither DUN nor PAN seems to be available via bluetooth in F12 as well as F11.

So I’m considering whether I need that laptop or not: the MBP starts up in less than two seconds, thanks to the fact I always leave it in Suspend-to-RAM (and that’s faster than Google’s Chrome OS… I wonder why people seem to challenge the start-up time rather than fixing the suspension support, bah); the MBP lasts more than four hours on its battery; the MBP have a much sleeker design which makes it handier and I don’t have to go around with the clunky power supply (not only because the MBP’s is smaller, but also because I have my mom’s supply downstairs if I’m running low on battery); the MBP (with OSX at least) can connect properly, via bluetooth, to the phone and thus the Internet (most of the times at least). So at the end, I’m not going to use the Compaq for much.

I’ll create a Fedora 12 virtual machine on Yamato for testing my projects there, where most of the previous notes about stuff not working properly will be moot points.

*Post scriptum: I wrote the draft for this article a couple of days ago and in the mean time I set up the Fedora 12 virtual machine I noted in the last paragraph; it was that way, by trying out virtio, that I found the n-th qemu/kvm quirk that made me drop the “proper” qemu. Unfortunately with that new install, from scratch, not update, I found another share of problems.*

*The remote desktop support in GNOME is totally broken: I can see with tcpdump the request arriving, but no reply is given altogether. If you set an hostname in three parts (say, fedora12.qemu.local), Avahi will advertise fedora12.local instead. system-config-services is not installed by default, and the first time I installed it I had to reboot otherwise I would only get crashes. One default cron job causes SELinux to report invalid accesses to /var/lib … all in all, it seems to me like Fedora 11 was way more polished!*