I’ve been running Fedora 11 at home and work for a three days now, and I am very impressed. With Linux being a very mature product and Fedora releasing twice a year, an upgrade isn’t the radical experience it was nine or ten years ago, when Linux was raw and new. Nowadays each release is an incremental improvement.

There are new versions of the familiar apps: Open Office 3.1.0, Firefox 3.5, Gnome 2.26.1, GCC 4.4.0, Python 2.6, Gimp 2.6, Pidgin 2.5.5. Open Office can open those annoying .docx files. Gnome’s menus seem a bit tidier. PulseAudio is meant to be much better. Will hopefully solve my friends’ sound problems, but it was alright on my laptop before, so I haven’t noticed that difference.

Boot times are faster. The goal for Fedora 11 was to be at the login screen in 20 seconds. On my laptop it takes 30 seconds, but that’s still pretty good. My laptop is a Dell D620 with, I’m very happy to report, suspend and resume working perfectly on it. Also fixed on my laptop is an annoying problem Fedora 9 had with simulated middle mouse button clicks. Now either the top two or the bottom two touchpad buttons can be used. Power usage is meant to be optimised, haven’t tested if this means I get an extended battery life yet.

The kernel installed is 2.6.29.4. This is a bit of a problem at work, as VMware-Player can’t build modules to run against this version. Ubuntu, openSuse and Gentoo users have also hit this problem. There are long, complicated, discussion forum threads with different patches which claim to fix things, but don’t work for me. Eventually VMware will catch up and release a new version of VMware-Player which will work with the 2.6.29 kernel. It’s a pain to wait, but that’s what you get with kernel code which doesn’t live with the rest of code in the kernel source tree.

Fedora 11 has the new ext4 filesystem format as default. This should make file access faster. I was working on ext4 support at my previous job for their product. I’m a bit surprised the Fedora installer (Anaconda) won’t allow the root filesystem to be ext4. ext4 can support a mix of on-disk structures (pind/dind/tind blocks or extents) and I thought this allowed Grub to still boot from it. Oh well, ext3 will do for /boot until Grub2 is finished (or the world ends, whichever comes first).

Lastly the fonts look fantastic. I’m not sure exactly what has changed there. Fedora has had nice fonts for a while, but text is looking very smooth these days. Though I did have problems with DDD (the GDB debugger front end). The DDD user interface hasn’t changed much for many many years and obviously can’t use the new fonts. It was displaying very large ugly letters, so I installed a bunch of the old font packages like xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi. That’s fixed DDD so it is at least acceptable to work with.

I’m pretty pleased with how the upgrade has gone. All up Fedora 11 seems a bit faster, more polished and nice and stable. I recommend giving it a try.

Today I have been floating between the MySQL, SysAdmin and Kernel MiniConfs.

Stewart Smith shared what MySQL has in development (for 6.0 or beyond).
Listed on the wiki. The most appealing to me would be true online backups.

In the Kernel MiniConf Christoph Hellwig gave a brief demo of using a emulated hardware device on QEmu to excercise a Linux device driver. This is described as much easier than VHDL. He breezed very quickly through it all. Didn’t follow the details of the code, but he described the device driver as being “so easy a monkey could write it”. He’s promised to upload the code to http://verein.lst.de/~hch, so I’ll have a play with it later and see if I can attain code-monkey status.

Ryan Fursttalks talked on using open source for disaster recovery/backups. With a mention on how much cheaper it is than Veritas software.

Trent Loyd gave plenty of tips on diagnosing MySQL problems. The title “support procedures” had me thinking it was going to be how to fill in bug reports. I was pleasantly surprised instead.

I was very interested in Oliver Hookins’ talk on high availability and replication of a MySQL database cluster. I’m not likely to need to set up such a highly redundant system, but it was still worth learning about and a couple of tools (Heartbeat and MySQL replication) will definitely be useful.

Caught the last half of the kernel lightning talks, and the kernel developers’
panel. Linus is around, but unfortunately for us didn’t join in. I realize now I should have been prepared with a question or two on block device/filesystem ioctls: is the FIBMAP ioctl deprecated? is there a replacement available (as suggested by Ted T’so) yet?

Had an enjoyable and social dinner with the other Kiwis here.

I’m running Fedora 8 with a i686 kernel on my work dev machine, but for some reason Yum is installing i586 kernel modules. I only have two: fuse for NTFS and the nvidia proprietary video driver. I know proprietary drivers are evil, but with the open source nv driver, the video card fan never switches off, and it is LOUD… it’d quickly drive me nuts if I had to work with it going all the time.

It took me a while to realize ATrpms wasn’t giving me corrupt packages. They’re perfectly good modules if you have a i586 kernel. But for me whenever I tried to modprobe them I got error messages like:

FATAL: Error inserting fuse (/lib/modules/2.6.23.9-85.fc8/updates/fs/fuse/fuse.ko): Invalid module format

This doesn’t seem to be a very common problem, maybe I have messed up my yum.conf?

My solution is brutal but effective. I removed all the nvidia driver packages, explicidly installed the i686 version of the driver, and then reinstalled the rest of the nvidia driver stuff. I haven’t done this for fuse yet, but I’m sure the same approach should work there too.