December 03, 2013

Upgrading to Fedora 19

Upgrading to Fedora 19

Some pleasant surprises and not so pleasant too.

Performance is excellent. F19 is much faster than F14 on which I stayed since it was released. It could be that running off a 1 TB drive F19 benefits from higher platter-to-controller transfer rate, but even the operations not requiring disk I/O feel instant where they were previously taking time.

Not wanting to put up with Gnome 3 monstrocity (puke!) I had to switch to KDE (due to Mate not really being a replacement for Gnome 2, although claiming that). KDE is kind of OK with a few glitches. One example is that Oracle 11g Express edition did not create app launcher menu items on install. They are in the 'Recently installed' menu, but not found under the standard menu structure. It's still a big improvement over F14 where Oracle XE simply did not want to start.

The kernel crashed a few times, each time undoing the configuration changes to the plasma widgets I've added.

Update 1:

Now about complete fsck ups.
  • CIFS shares cannot close files. While copying files to Windows machines, the 0 size files get created, process then writes X number of bytes to the file and freezes so that machine has to be rebooted.
  • CUPS cannot print to the network printers. The JetDirect HP that worked fine under F14 now prints one empty sheet and 2nd sheet with error message while LCD displays 'BAD TRANSMISSION' and error LED flashes.
  • Thunderbird cannot send HTML emails and plain text emails longer than probably 1kB.

It sounds like someone completely screwed up network stack in the 3.9.x and up kernels. How typical for an open source project! Someone is totally screwing up perfectly working functionality and no one cares. Bug reports met with hostility and reluctance as usual.

Overall rating: 1 out of 5.

I'll sticky this for a while to see how this clusterfuck is going to be resolved.

Update 2:

Apparently, CIFS file writing and Thunderbird email sending issues have been resolved... under KDE only. They still exist once switching the desktop to Mate. How a desktop manager can interfere with a non-Gnome app writing files to a kernel-mounted share is beyond me, but it's the fact of life.

KDE likes to freeze. Just a little bit, here and there, it freezes.

Yumex became a single-use applcation in a sense that it is only possible to install/erase package once. If within the same Yumex instance one tries to install more packages, it will freeze with a blank progress window. You would think that developers should have noticed that in test. Should they? They must have only tried once and were gratified. We, developers in commercial enfironment, get flogged and fired for such lack of realistic test scenarios. Isn't open source development grand?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 12:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 471 words, total size 3 kb.

Comments are disabled.
13kb generated in CPU 0.0092, elapsed 0.051 seconds.
33 queries taking 0.0444 seconds, 125 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.