Fedora

Now, I know some of you here wouldn't deign to check out Fedora, but I'm wondering if anyone has, nonetheless. I've not had any Sager-specific problems with my machine while using RedHat (8, 8.1, 9), including the firewire-install-lockups.

I'm mildly motivated to move to Fedora in order to have ACPI and GL stuff work for me at the same time (long story), which seems to be the case.

If I do decide to do the upgrade, I'll be glad to post my experiences if anyone is interested...

One thing I read - but it's hard to really confirm - is that some people are having "multimedia" problems. xmms skipping, etc. Of course, others report that it's even better than usual.

Now that freshrpms has a Fedora section, I'm not too worried :-)

Thanks!

The xmms/mp3 issue has been around since RH8.0 (mp3s are proprietary and RH is trying to do the right thing). You can get the xmms-mp3 plugins from a variety of places, including gurulabs, etc.

Well, no one asked, but I'll give a brief review anyway.

Nuked my RH 9 partition (so I could grow it) and installed Fedora from scratch. Very nice, no changes from my other RH experiences - nothing hung, everything detected, etc.

I enjoy having ACPI as well as the 2.4.22 kernel running concurrently. Fast! Very Fast! Running over to freshmeat, installing apt/synaptic - I love it.

The multimedia problems reported as OSNews are weird, as I'm getting a noticable improvement in places (little things...like the opening movie on Enemy Territory).

The new graphical booter IS kinda' cool. I didn't like how, on 9.1B, the booter would simply take away your ability to watch the startup process (give me practical over eye candy, well, most of the time). The new flavor simply gives you the [OK] process inside a window. Looks nice.

ONE problem: I hung, completely, in the middle of an scp transfer. I powercycled and expected to reboot properly. Well, everything continues, but when the machine detects a bad shutdown, it bails OUT of the graphical boot process and then hangs. Ultimately, I booted into single user, shutdown, and then rebooted.

I also know three people with PCMCIA/wireless problems. I use a Gold Orinoco card which worked flawlessly in RH6 -> 9 (unlike, say, Windows...). When I was loading, I had some problems, but eventually got my config right...but, now, after working fine for a couple of days, the pcmcia has stopped working and has even gone to the point of hanging on bootup. If I skip it with interactive mode, it'll then work. No biggie, but things like that bother me.

More later, off on vacation!

Well, I haven't "messed" with it since I got it working with version 9, out of the box. I certainly use it all day long (at the very least, inside my gkrellm temp monitor). I think it's great.

Ah. No, I haven't played with it at all in that regard. My battery is screwed up (it reports being at 2% after about 15m off the plug and then stays for about an hour or so). When I'm unplugged and need to use it, it's almost always to do text-based work, so I just boot into single user and take care of things. Lazy, I suppose.

Have you seen the articles here from laclass about ACPI? Very helpful. I don't have any doubts that Fedora would allow me to adjust it properly.

I believe that's the entire point.

However:

1) On a 5660, the stock battery is WEAK. This is well documented. If you want to get more battery life...get an extra or replace our stock ones with something decent. :-(

2) As for needing Fedora to do what you're looking at, I don't think you need to. I'm getting the same functionality, AFAIK, from Fedora as I did from RH9.

Check on the 5660-specific forum for the battery replacement issue; someone there might be able to help. Good luck, meanwhile.