![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
OS upgrade
Aug. 24th, 2004 09:48 amYay! Finally I'm ready to retire RedHat 8 and use FedoraCore 2 all the time. FC2 is *slightly* faster (new scheduler in 2.6 kernel) and I've tuned it better for my low-memory (160 MB) configuration.
I bought a replacement hard-drive for my laptop--the old one was starting to get bad blocks anyway--and spent a month swapping disks back and forth, installing FC2 on the new one and then going back to RH8 to get real work done, backing up RH8 files to another machine and then redownloading them to FC2.
FC2 as released has some nasty bugs. Like, PCMCIA doesn't work--because they forgot to load the Yenta driver! Um, excuse me, are there no laptops included in the pre-relase regression test??? Thankfully it's a very popular Linux distro, and it's been out for months, so there's now 1,000,001 web pages out there about all its problems and how to get around them, including at least 10 that have the right answer.
There were also lots of problems with sound output. The ThinkPad 600 uses the CS4236 audio chip with nonstandard I/O addresses -- but again Google was my friend and found for me lots of people who were telling their stories about how they had solved the same problem--good thing the TP600 is such a popular platform for Linux! FC2 still resets the volume controls to zero after every reboot, same as RH8. I was hoping for great things from the ALSA sound system, but it's been disappointing. The CS4236 driver claims the chip has hardware MIDI support, but it doesn't. No problem--ALSA can use TiMidity as MIDI-→PCM conversion server. Problem--I have yet to hear it work. Not to mention that the prelinked copy of TiMidity included with FC2 has the ALSA-server function compiled out, and the first dozen websites I checked all pointed to a belly-up website as the home page for TiMidity sources. But eventually I found out where TiMidity lives today (apparently the project's baton has now been passed to a third primary maintainer). So I downloaded it and compiled it with server functionality enabled and I gave it some soundfonts and it chews up CPU time when I try to play MIDI, but there's no sound output. Maybe I'll get it working someday. And I had really wanted to use LilyPond and Brahms and the other music-editing stuff that wouldn't run under RH8!
Another annoyance: For RH8, kmail was the best mailreader. I tried a bunch of them for FC2, and kmail is still the best, but it's no longer available separately. Now I have to install kdepim, which combines mail-reader and organizer and lots of other crap I don't want. And kdepim requires a shitload of KDE support libraries, including lm_sensors. There are various webpages about the ThinkPad 600 which say that lm_sensors must never be activated on this platform because it puts the motherboard into an irrecoverable state. For RH8 I was able to just not install it, but now I have to be careful--or maybe I should just dummy it out?
I had wanted to use Drivel, the FC2-only LiveJournal client, but that was another disappointment. It's just a WYSIWYG posting editor! I can post using the web form, thank you. I want a client to help me keep track of comments on friends' journals, but there's no such client, apparently because it's against LJ policy to write one. I complained about that and found some sympathetic voices on the LJ core team, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to Do The Right Thing™.
If you understood all that, you're a geek.
I bought a replacement hard-drive for my laptop--the old one was starting to get bad blocks anyway--and spent a month swapping disks back and forth, installing FC2 on the new one and then going back to RH8 to get real work done, backing up RH8 files to another machine and then redownloading them to FC2.
FC2 as released has some nasty bugs. Like, PCMCIA doesn't work--because they forgot to load the Yenta driver! Um, excuse me, are there no laptops included in the pre-relase regression test??? Thankfully it's a very popular Linux distro, and it's been out for months, so there's now 1,000,001 web pages out there about all its problems and how to get around them, including at least 10 that have the right answer.
There were also lots of problems with sound output. The ThinkPad 600 uses the CS4236 audio chip with nonstandard I/O addresses -- but again Google was my friend and found for me lots of people who were telling their stories about how they had solved the same problem--good thing the TP600 is such a popular platform for Linux! FC2 still resets the volume controls to zero after every reboot, same as RH8. I was hoping for great things from the ALSA sound system, but it's been disappointing. The CS4236 driver claims the chip has hardware MIDI support, but it doesn't. No problem--ALSA can use TiMidity as MIDI-→PCM conversion server. Problem--I have yet to hear it work. Not to mention that the prelinked copy of TiMidity included with FC2 has the ALSA-server function compiled out, and the first dozen websites I checked all pointed to a belly-up website as the home page for TiMidity sources. But eventually I found out where TiMidity lives today (apparently the project's baton has now been passed to a third primary maintainer). So I downloaded it and compiled it with server functionality enabled and I gave it some soundfonts and it chews up CPU time when I try to play MIDI, but there's no sound output. Maybe I'll get it working someday. And I had really wanted to use LilyPond and Brahms and the other music-editing stuff that wouldn't run under RH8!
Another annoyance: For RH8, kmail was the best mailreader. I tried a bunch of them for FC2, and kmail is still the best, but it's no longer available separately. Now I have to install kdepim, which combines mail-reader and organizer and lots of other crap I don't want. And kdepim requires a shitload of KDE support libraries, including lm_sensors. There are various webpages about the ThinkPad 600 which say that lm_sensors must never be activated on this platform because it puts the motherboard into an irrecoverable state. For RH8 I was able to just not install it, but now I have to be careful--or maybe I should just dummy it out?
I had wanted to use Drivel, the FC2-only LiveJournal client, but that was another disappointment. It's just a WYSIWYG posting editor! I can post using the web form, thank you. I want a client to help me keep track of comments on friends' journals, but there's no such client, apparently because it's against LJ policy to write one. I complained about that and found some sympathetic voices on the LJ core team, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to Do The Right Thing™.
If you understood all that, you're a geek.
