Year: 2013

Upgrade to Fedora 18

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Fedora 18 has been released.  And since now I have a somewhat flagman role for quite a few Fedora users around me, I took the courageous step of upgrading my personal laptop from Fedora 17 to 18.  More or less it went smooth.   Here are the notes for things that broke:

  1. As mentioned in the previous post, you should use “fedup –network 18” instead of “preupgrade“.   This is my preferred way of upgrading, since I can still use the computer while the download and good chunk of the upgrade are being done.
  2. Broken KDE.  Upon the first boot I got as far as the graphical login prompt.  Upon entering the username and password, and selecting KDE as the preferred session, I’d get a KDE loader screen for a bit, then a few screen spasms, a black console, and eventually an automatic reset back to the graphical login prompt.  That was ugly!   I tried it a few times, but it was behaving consistently.  Gnome however worked just fine.  All I had to do to sort this out was install updates.  But, there was a minor issue with that too – see the next one.
  3. No updates.  Running “yum update” was consistently telling me that I have no updates to install.  I found that difficult to believe, since I know for a fact that updates are available for Linux distributions pretty much the moment a new version is released.  Solution to the problem is a reset of yum cache, by using “yum clean all”.  Once that is done “yum update” will bring the usual megabytes of updates.  KDE bits and pieces are in there too.  Which sorted out the previous option.
  4. Google Chrome won’t start, spitting out an error of some missing library.  That looked weird.  Gladly, the solution is easy, and finding one is a single Google search away.  Simply re-install the RPM and all will be back to normal.
  5. Git branch information in bash prompt was no more.  Luckily, that was covered in the Release Notes.  A necessary shell file has been moved from one location to another, so .bashrc should be updated.

So, is there anything good in this version that would counter the above issues?  I don’t know, honestly, I haven’t been using it long enough yet.  The things that I’ve noticed are:

  • Some kind of a new behavior in the graphical login.  There is a screensaver-like mode before the prompt that shows time and date.  That’s convenient.  But dragging that screen away with the mouse a la mobile/tablet interface, is not very productive.
  • Dolphin file manager in KDE seems to be a lot more responsive.  At least it starts now in split second.   That was taking almost five seconds on the same machine before.  Not that I use that often, but it’s handy.
  • Gnome 3 polishing.  When I briefly logged into it, I noticed better shadows and borders for windows, as well as some system monitoring widgets in the activities screen.  That looked better than I remember it.

So far – not too much.  Hopefully, more awesomeness will be discovered during the next few days.

Fedora 18

After a two month delay, Fedora 18 is finally here.  So far, I have been surprised by two things:

  1. Phasing out of “preupgrade” for “fedup“.  Seriously?  How’s “fedup –network 18” better than “preupgrade“?  Especially, when dealing with desktop users…
  2. How much new stuff I found in the Release Notes.  I didn’t have much time to follow the development process last year, but even without that, I realized that a lot of my knowledge is quite outdated.  Specifically: GRUB vs GRUB2 configuration, chkconfig/service vs. systemctl, date/hostname/etc migration to some*ctl scripts, network management (both with NetworkManager and with interface naming changes), and lots more.

And I haven’t even upgraded yet.  I wonder what will come next.

P.S.: if you must know, I’ve written a huge rant on the whole Fedora direction, but after page 35 or so it got a little bit out of control, so I deleted it and left you with the above.

What’s in the room? A fear. Or two.

OK, you gonna hate me for this, but I just couldn’t resist and read one more question from the The Daily Post.

You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.

I wanted to do a post like that for a while now.  But thinking of my fears takes away for a long time and then I don’t know how to connect them all,  with which one to start, and how to finish.  And on top of that I get really scared thinking of all my fears.  But, if I think in terms of the room, and I’m locked in there with my greatest fear, all of a sudden I see … just me.  And that explains at least four big fears that I have:

  1. Fear of loneliness.  That is probably my greatest fear.  I am not comfortable with myself for long periods of time, and I constantly need people around me.  I’d rather have the worst possible people next to me, than nobody at all.
  2. Fear of myself.  This one comes and goes.  But when it comes, it’s pretty scary, and, difficult to explain.  But I do fear myself sometimes.  For most time, I can control myself pretty well.  (Feel free to disagree.)  However once in a while I get into that mode where I have an almost out of body experience, watching myself from aside, doing something crazy.  It’s almost never good or bad, just stupid.  But having no control of it is scary.
  3. Fear of dentists.  And I hear you jump up immediately, screaming – YOU ARE NOT A DENTIST!!! And you are right, I am not.  But remember that this whole thing is hypothetical.  There’s me locked up in the room with my greatest fear.  Well, I am afraid of dentists.  I’ve had more than a fair share of bad experiences and something snapped.  I think I might be so afraid of them, that even if I become one, I’d still have the fear.  And given that fear #2, I might just once have an uncontrollable desire to fix my own teeth.  Isn’t that scary?
  4. Fear of the dark.  Yeah, remember that room?  Someone switched off the lights and closed the shutters too, so it’s pitch black.  That alone wouldn’t throw me into a panic attack anymore – I used to be afraid of the dark a lot more when I was kid – but given all those other fears in the room, I would be pretty miserable.

OK, enough, as I said before, these thoughts get me scared.  I should get of the Internet now and go hide somewhere with people and lights, and without dentists.

What are you afraid off?  What would be in that room of yours?  Answering ‘you’ is cheating. :)