RedHat has dropped support for their RedHat Linux line and they propose the Fedora Core project as a replacement.
I ran RedHat 9.0 on my laptop and decided to upgrade to Fedora Core release 1 as this seemed the most convenient way to obtain an OS that is still being developed.
- Install/Upgrade
The install process went as smooth as possible. Fedora picked up the list of RPMs I had installed on my laptop and just upgraded them all.
- ACPI support
Battery, thermal and processor support without kernel recompile. Nice and works out of the box. (you have to add acpi=on in the kernel parameters line in grub.conf or equivalent).
Can't set processor limits though. (echoing in the /proc/processor files makes is ignored).
- Infrared support
Works very nicely. Just had to edit /etc/sysconfig/irda and set the DEVICE to /dev/ttyS1 (the XE4500 does not have two serial ports outside the IRDA).
In fact I've connected via GPRS with a Nokia 6510.
Here are my settings:
[root@bluefish root]# cat /etc/ppp/peers/connex-gprs
/dev/ircomm0
57600
crtscts
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chat-connex-gprs'
noauth
debug
novj
nobsdcomp
novjccomp
nopcomp
defaultroute
noaccomp
noccp
nodeflate
user internet
noipdefault
[root@bluefish root]# cat /etc/ppp/chat-connex-gprs
ABORT "NO CARRIER"
ABORT "NO DIALTONE"
ABORT "ERROR"
ABORT "NO ANSWER"
ABORT "BUSY"
ABORT "Username/Password Incorrect"
"" "at"
OK "AT+CGDCONT=,,\"internet.connex.ro\""
OK "AT+CGDATA=\"PPP\""
- LCD brightness controls (Fn+F1/F2)
These used to be broken in RedHat 9.0 (2.4.18 kernels) and what a major nuisance that was!
I had to boot into Windows to set the brightness and that was very annoying. Now fixed, thank you very much.
The numlock key does something too, although I was unable to figure out exactly what it does.
The louder and quieter keys (located on the left side, next to the headphones jack) send keycodes. This makes it possible to map aumix events on them through your window maker. Nice!
- Firewire support
Still works but external harddisks that used to work through sbp2 out of the box now require the use of the rescan-scsi-bus script.
- Eclipse, because I used JDK 1.3 with RedHat 9.0 and only JDKs 1.4+ support Fedora's NLPTL (new thread lib).
Upgraded the JDK to 1.4.2_02; now eclipse runs fine. (although it does spit a "** ERROR **: Must shutdown ORB from main thread" message and the JDK crashes when shutting down; the error seems harmless though, projects and workspaces get saved).
- vim
I can't get it to drop the antialiasing on fonts.
I for one don't need antialised fonts in gvim. In fact antialiasing makes the application unusable.
What happens is I get:
while what I want is more suited for my 1024x768 LCD:
For some reason if I choose the font from the list (Edit->Select Font in the gvim menu) I get the font without antialiasing.
If I quit and restart gvim, it is antialiased again.
Note: my current fix was to alias gvim to 'gvim -font "MiscFixed 12"'.
- RPM database
When upgrading (but I think this happens for most systems and not only Fedora) old RPMs that don't have a correspondent in the new system are abandoned (and the files they installed are "orphaned"). This happened with the JDK files (installed via RPM from Sun) and the alsa driver files (installed via RPM from freshrpms.net).
A list of all the orphaned files would be nice. Better yet, why not keep the old RPMs in the database?
