On 2008‒11‒03, updates from Livna killed X on Fedora 9 on my Dell Studio 15. I will not elaborate further because I cannot. The timing was great: I had planned to install the Preview release of Fedora 10 (Cambridge) on its release date (2008‒11‒04), so I did that. Hell followed. Here are some pointers, many of which are specific to my system and personal stupidity:
- When booting, the i386 install DVD image prompted me to press enter. I received no feedback when pressing enter and conceded.
- I installed from the Fedora 10 beta i386 install DVD image. Unfortunately, changes made to GRUB for Plymouth as of then were incomplete, and updating them with Yum from Rawhide did not help. After my BIOS would load, GRUB would not display my menu and would start interactively (I could still boot to Fedora 10, which ran fine). The Plymouth readme showed me the light:
“Plymouth isn’t really designed to be built from source by end users. For it to work
correctly, it needs integration with the distribution. Because it starts so early,
it needs to be packed into the distribution’s initial ram disk, and the distribution
needs to poke plymouth to tell it how boot is progressing.” - Fedora Live CDs do not permit mountpoints on ext4 partitions. That was an issue because I had been using ext4 since I installed Fedora 9.
- Anaconda’s partitioning screen gave inaccurate information on my ext4 partitions’ sizes.
I performed a clean install using the Fedora i386 Network Installer. My reactions:
- The Echo icon theme is pretty.
- Gnome 2.2x has nice but fairly insignificant changes.
- Eclipse Ganymede features several improvements.
- The OpenJDK VisualVM seems nifty.
- RPM 4.6 has many improvements I have been wanting (namely bug fixes and support for SHA-256)
- Much faster startup.
- Plymouth resorted to the text-based loading plugin which is not as esthetic as RHGB was, but the consistency is nice)
- SecurityAudit looks useful (I have hardly used it, though).
- Cheese now crashes with my webcam.
- sbin sanity pleased me.
Ultimately, the most useful change was Eclipse Ganymede—which I could have installed with Fedora 9. But I feel better simply because I am running Fedora 10—a result of OCD.
Tags: anaconda, cambridge, ext4, fedora, fedora 10, linux, live cd, plymouth, project, rawhide, rhgb