Fedora 9 Feeling
Now that I've used Fedora 9 for a couple of days I want to share some insights and rant a bit.
One of the features I like the most and that bugs me the most at the same time is PackageKit. It's awesome to be able to allow installation once and not be asked again (with this I can finally grant install permissions to a few people without giving them full root, awesome!). What is the most annoying is that I cannot prepare a transaction by marking a few packages for installation, and possibly some others for removal and then say commit or execute or whatever and it does it. No, for every package that I install it starts a new transaction immediately (someone else reported this on the devel list and was pointed to the FAQ so I hope this will getter over time).
Another thing that is annoying is that I can't see what dependencies get installed. I like to know what is installed. But after all I can use the console then I guess.
I'd like to filter out i386 packages on x86_64 altogether unless I explicitly request them. An arch specific filter seems reasonable for this. Also trying to install an i386 package where the x86_64 has already been installed fails with a message that the package has already been installed.
Another bad point is the time it takes to show info about an update if I click on the package name. I cannot quickly grasp through the updates as I used to. Also the text should be wrapped for better readability. What I like is the way bugzilla entries are referenced. Why was the "Add/Remove software" entry removed from the applications menu? This was much more obvious for users.
Another really bad experience is the new default firewall. My arguments went overheard, multicast DNS (used by Avahi) is no longer allowed by default. This way for instance Gnome file shares do not just work anymore and contact to the robots is lost. Additionally the CUPS port is no longer open. So automatic browsing of printers won't work. Another "just works" experience gone. Security is a good thing, but these crucial points of usability should have been respected. (#446828).
The next thing I tried is virt-manager. I had to find out that the virt-storage feature is not yet available as I had somehow expected. I tried installing OpenSolaris 2008.5. Interestingly when selecting i686 as machine type I was not able to choose KVM as hypervisor on x86_64 (#446817). When I tried to create a logical volume I couldn't find system-config-lvm anywhere in the menu (#446774). OpenSolaris is faster on F-9 than it was with F-8, but still it's not much fun using it in the VM. Also the network won't work, this seems to be related to the note on the KVM guest support status page that you have to use e1000 and not the rtl adapter. This had been switched back just recently in Fedora and you can't choose. There is still no entry for FreeBSD 7 in the menu, using the FreeBSD 6.x entry makes it work just fine though (#446819).
The new Firefox 3 is quite nice overall. The tabclearsearch extension is no longer available so I patched the one I had to allow installation on Firefox 3, and it still works! You can get it from my fedorapeople.org webspace (XPI installer). Annoying is that Firefox will pop to the foreground whenever it opens an URL. That means that I cannot click the current ten news entries in Liferea anymore and then switch to Firefox and read them. Rather I have to switch back and forth all the time. The same for links in emails opened with Thunderbird. Is there any way to turn off this behavior?
All special IBM keys are just supported. Even Fn-F2 locks the screen! What does not work is enabling/disabling Bluetooth with Fn-F5. This used to work at the beginning of F-8 but after some kernel upgrade it did not any longer. There is a workaround that I documented in #399601.
Overall I'm quite happy with Fedora 9. Especially that my Intel wifi just works and that support for an encrypted root partition has been added to Anaconda is great! Suspend to RAM and hibernate are working again which is awesome (turning your computer off or hibernating, but not putting it to soft sleep will prolong battery life, not for the daily cycle but it will last a couple of months longer before it's totally broken).
On the development side we were running a rawhide build slave for the last couple of months migrating our sofware to the new GCC is easy now. Though I expect some vendors to block harder when asking for new library or driver releases for a while, they are usually already picky if you ask for x86_64 packages. Point Grey for example provides their software only for Fedora Core 1 and 3 on 32 bit systems, can you believe that?
While searching through the bugs to see if something has already been filed I couldn't find a search plugin for Firefox for this. So I created a Red Hat Bugzilla search plugin and submitted it to Mycroft. Maybe it's useful to others as well.
Fedora community keep on rocking, we still have got a lot of work to do.
