I just upgraded to Fedora Cora 6. Here’s the short installment (the whole thing took a couple of days):
It’s a three-click installer with one reboot. Take that Windows! It takes four hours to complete. Lucky I had nothing but meetings that day.
I had to rebuilt the Wifi driver, they still don’t ship one for the Intel IPW3945. I had to rebuilt the Sony ACPI module, they still don’t ship one that works with pretty much every Vaio sold by Sony today.
Neither of which worked, and cpuspeed didn’t work either. No Wifi means using the power hungry EVDO card. No ACPI means the screen is always at maximum brightness. No cpuspeed means running a constant 2GHz with the fan on. That’s about 30 minutes of battery life.
By the end of the day I found out it’s a known bug with a mismatch kernel version number. Two downloads later, one reboot, and everything works.
Including hibernation. It only took 8 months and I got my notebook to hibernate. Except, now it hibernates instead of suspending. I’m sure that’s a one-line configuration fix, I just haven’t found it yet.
No Firefox. So I can stare at the shiny screen all day long, but I can’t get any work done. I managed to download one from Mozilla that worked, but horribly wrong. It worked long enough to search the forums and not find an answer.
No Acrobat Reader. Not that I’ll miss it, given the choice I always conserve on bloat and use KPDF. But sometimes Firefox defaults to using Acrobat, which causes it to hang. Turns out it’s a version mismatch with GTK, that two two lines to fix. Magically, that also fixed the pre-installed Firefox.
So hardware is working, Firefox is working, and we’re back in business. Sort of.
Somehow Fedora decided to nuke my JVM. Not misplace, but displace. So everything I have that relies on JAVA_HOME stopped working. A quick search with ls -l `which java` led me to /etc/alternative, which itself points to something called GIJ? I’m not sure what it is, but it’s certainly not JDK 1.5.
Nuked and replaced with JDK 1.5.
No OpenOffice. It turns out that removing faux-Java also removes Sun’s OpenOffice. Re-installing Sun’s OpenOffice also re-installs faux Java. In Fedoraland this all makes sense. Disk space doesn’t cost much after all, and licensing issues prevail over user experience.
No database connection. Somehow Fedora also decided to nuke my MySQL server. I don’t remember asking for that during the upgrade, it just took the initiative. Maybe to clear up room for GIJ?
Beryl. Beryl is one of those magical pieces of software that make your computer so much more useable. Fortunately, the Vaio comes with two(!) video cards. Which means I can choose. I can use the nVidia card which does Beryl but no suspend/resume. Or I can use the i945GM which does suspend/resume but no Beryl.
I wouldn’t be so upset about wasting two days cleaning up after an OS upgrade, if it wasn’t for losing my bragging rights. When Linux is not any better than Windows, what’s the point in being a geek?
Update: You do have to choose. Turns out the nVidia driver conflicts with the i945 driver, so it’s one or the other. But I got Beryl working and I’m happily rotating cubes.
Ryan King
Assaf
Hsiu-Fan Wang