sulfur smells bad
Since I didn't have much else to do this past weekend, I decided to start upgrading the computers from Fedora8 to Fedora9 (Sulphur). While there weren't any huge showstopper problems, there were some rather pathetic problems.
David's computer didn't suffered the most. NetworkManager remains a horrible piece of crap. I can't fathom what the appeal of this thing is. Yet again, when it was started (seemingly at random) at boot, the network just didn't work at all. After replacing it with the good old reliable /etc/init.d/network, everything worked perfectly. Until I tried to start X. David'd computer is the only one left that uses Gnome by default. That is, until, today. Something horrific happened to Gnome during the upgrade to the extent that its completely broken. It just hangs at startup, and all these nasty assertions get fired out of metacity. And yes, it does this for newly created accounts as well as pre-existing accounts. Gnome=broken. So it was time to install XFCE. That worked without any big problems. Of course there were little ones. For some reason, even though I had logged into XFCE, Gnome kept attempting to takeover as the session manager. Eventually I figured out that somehow Nautilus was getting started at login due to the session manager thinking that it needed to run. After killing it and then logging out & back in, Gnome was finally put out of its misery.
As a side rant, I'd really like to know why the kernel-devel RPMs were removed from the default installation media? That seems like an utterly stupid move. The people who might need it most are those who are using out of tree kernel modules. If they happen to be using one for a network device, then they're going to end up rather screwed when they can't bring up the network to do a "yum -y install kernel-devel". I ended up having to download the RPM on a different system, and then move it to David's system with a USB key. What a huge PITA.
Denise's laptop faired alot better, although admittedly she isn't using Gnome at all, so its quite possible that it was/is broken on her system as well. The only big problem on her system was that the PCM audio volume was muted, and this was obscured by the Fedora8 winner of the piece of crap award, PulseAudio. I'm starting to spot a trend. Every new package that has a shiny, user-friendly name (PulseAudio, NetworkManager) is complete junk. I had to disable PulseAudio by renaming /etc/alsa/pulse-default.conf, run alsamixer to unmute PCM, then put pulse-default.conf back to get the audio volume working.
Overall, I'm rather unimpressed with Fedora9 thus far. At the rate that they're going, Ubuntu is going to start to seem appealing.