rm-rf.ca

While my initial attempt to get rolling with the Fedora 11 Beta was pretty rocky, one of the bugzilla's regarding Anaconda's inability to recognize my existing install for an upgrade got duped on another bug about an intermittent udev timeout. Indeed if at first Anaconda didn't realize it could upgrade my system, rebooting off the ISO corrected the problem, might take a few tries if you experience something similar.

As soon as the ISO upgrade completed my X was pretty busted, actually locking the machine up hard, so it was time for runlevel 3 and a BIG yum update. (like 1.2 GB big) This went relatively smooth, the only real issues I had were warnings and failed scriptlets related to selinux. Fedora 10 was the first time I've been able to use selinux in enforcing, but for now it's down to permissive, possibly disabled soon as it's constantly popping up with warnings as I write this. :) Looks to be dbus related.

Otherwise things look great. The big thing I was after is better dual head support, I've recently upgraded to an ATI video card with two DVI ports and attached two monitors of radically different resolutions. (one widescreen 1680x1050 and one regular 1600x1200) In Fedora 10 it didn't work so hot out of the box and I had to get a custom xorg.conf in place to get proper resolutions. Even then it was a little glitchy particularly with fonts, on starting X they would appear normally but as soon as I opened the GNOME Appearance dialog they would blow up huge, I'd then have to go scale them down three sizes (normally I'd use Sans and Monospace 10) to 7. This caused some irritation just in it's weirdness but even then it didn't look "right", particularly on the widescreen (my primary display).

In F11, removing the xorg.conf I had completely, things are looking much better. By default I get mirrored displays at a crappy common resolution, but once in GNOME the Screen Resolution preferences recognizes both monitors and their correct resolutions, and lets me turn off mirroring and arrange them. Even better fonts look *perfect* on both displays. (actually now X seems to start and the fonts appear unusually small, then opening the Appearance dialog causes them to go to the correct size) Metacity is maximizing windows nicely on both monitors, very pleased with the end result.

Other random things to note, rpmfusion is fortunately easy to get working with rawhide and seems to work great for the handful of package I use from it. Seeing some nice improvements to Packagekit's UI. I'm digging the new gnome-do taskbar and trying to go with it as a replacement for my previous standard gnome panel on the bottom as you can see in the above screenshot. I'm hearing some pleasant sound effects from GNOME that I don't recall hearing before, and my volume shortcut keys have started working again. (they somehow stopped in F10, seemed to not be controlling the right device) Firefox 3 beta 3 is also noticeably faster. Last but not least, my pre-existing KVM guests boot up fine, and the keyboard mouse interaction inside those I use the GUI console on seems vastly improved.

That's all I've noticed so far, aside from selinux problems it's looking pretty solid. Very pleased so far.