FC17 post-install problems
 

Hello,

Yesterday I upgraded my previous system of FC14+GNOME
to FC17+KDE (AMD Phenom X4, x86_64 architecture,
since the versions gap was above 2 I had to do
a full install from DVD but I didn't format the
"/home" directory to preserve my files, I also backed
on tape the whole "/" and separately "/home")
and I have few issues:

1) During the installation I selected both GNOME and KDE.
The default session of the login process is GNOME. How
can I make KDE the default session? Currently I select
"unlisted" user, then select KDE, then enter the username,
then discover that the selected session again changed to GNOME
so I select KDE again and this time the KDE starts. I'm sure
there is some configuration file somewhere selecting this
but I forgot where.

2) Firefox got updated and now I lost the ability to view flash
clips. I remember that in the previous version the process
of flash plugin install was not so straightforward, I looked
at the saved URLs of some tips but none worked.
Can anyone remind me how to install the flash plugin for
Firefox? What is the package name? Searching the net I
encountered different package names and I'm somewhat confused.

3) I want to continue using the "Evolution" as my mailer.
But when I started it, I discovered that from a large number
of mail folders that I had in Evolution under GNOME only few
"survived" under KDE. How can I restore them? Will just
restoring the "~/.local/share/evolution/mail" be enough?
What looks strange to me is that part of the folders remained -
if none would present it would make more sense for me but why
only some survived and others didnt? If I'll chose to use
"kmail", will I be able to restore the same mail folders structure
from the saved "~/.local/share/evolution/mail" ? How to
transfer the authentification details from Evolution to Kmail?

4) I noticed that in the new version of Firefox, when I open the
bookmarks tree, there is a wider gap between each adjascent
bookmarks/folders which causes lists that previously fit the screen
to be too high, requiring me to scroll for what used to be
instantly visible. I searched through the preferences of
Firefox but didn't find anything that controls spacing between the
lines of bookmarks list (tried reducing fonts size from 16
to 14 but to no avail). Where can I change this gap? Is it
something related to the desktop theme? Can anyone remind me
how can I change themes and change attribute of a particular
theme?

These are the first few issues I encountered after the installation,
I guess I'll have few more until I'll stabilize my system.

TIA,
kaza.

To preserve my firefox configuration as much as possible when upgrading or even changing distros, I just migrate my old ~/.mozilla directory to the new installation. I haven't noticed wider gaps in the bookmark tree, perhaps it's because I keep the old configuration. As for flash, just grab the latest rpm from the Adobe website.

It appears that /etc/sysconfig/desktop specifies the default desktop.

Hi RockDoctor, thanks for the reply.

With regard to default KDE session setting: there is no file

/etc/sysconfig/desktop

on my system. Searching the web about default session setup I found few
posts with different ways this had been achieved with dates of the posts
going few years back so it seems to me this setup didn't remain consistent
over the years.

Then, in the middle of my reply it occured to me to seach for:
"FEDORA boot process", one of the results led me to:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/17/html/Installation_Guide/s2-boot-init-shutdown-init.html

where I've read:

In runlevel 5, Upstart runs a script called /etc/X11/prefdm. The prefdm script executes the preferred X display manager[10] — gdm, kdm, or xdm, depending on the contents of the /etc/sysconfig/desktop file.

Looking into the contents of /etc/X11/prefdm of my RedHat workstation at work
(where I'm now and assuming it's similar to what I have at home on my FC17 workstation)
I saw that without the /etc/sysconfig/desktop file the system will start the "gdm"
by default. After searching for examples of contents for the "/etc/sysconfig/desktop"
I'm assuming it should be:

DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER="KDM"

When I'll get back home (and will have spare time to get to my PC)
I'll try creating this file with the above contents and see if it'll solve
the problem.

BTW, why there are tso separate entities "desktop" and "display manager"?
What happens if they're different, like:

DESKTOP="GNOME"
DISPLAYMANAGER="KDM"

or:

DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER="GDM"

? Not that I want to do this, just as a matter of curiocity.


Regarding the Firefox losing ability to run flash clips: I'm quite sure
one of my attemps was downloading the RPM from Adobe site and installing it
but it didn't help. On this issue too, searching the web brings many
totally different tips separated by many years and Fedora versions
making it difficult to understand, which is relevant to me and which
isn't.

OK, after some more searching and reading at:

http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-adobe-flash-player-10-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel/

of the process I did at home which didn't work I scrolled to the bottom and saw a reply:

which seems to point to what I forgot. I'll try at home to move this
file and see if it solves the problem.

Any ideas welcomed,
TIA,
kaza.

You should be able to use any display manager with any desktop. My desktop is LXDE. I see that installing gdm would pull in a bunch of GNOME stuff I dont need, whereas installing kdm would pull in a bunch of KDE stuff. At one point I used slim as my display manager, but switched to lxdm when I realized slim requires the desktop-background-basic rpm, whereas lxdm does not.

OK, after some tickering things are improving but not 100% "as before":

1) Making KDE default - done, creating the file "/etc/sysconfig/desktop"
with contents

made KDE default. I think it was the installer bug: it should've asked the user
about the preferred desktop and created the file accordingly.

2) Making Firefox playing flash movies: sort of.
After downloading the ShockwareFlash from Adobe,
installing it and copying the file to the ~/.mizilla/plugins directory
some flash movies are played OK but some stop after about 10 seconds
(not always 10, at one point it stopped after 4 seconds). That
non-deterministic behavior looks strange. Did anyone encounter something similar?
The firefox version is: 12.0 and the ShockwareFlash version is: 11.2 r202

3) The most severe problem are the lost mails by Evolution: I had MANY different
folders with many e-mails before the upgrade but now only a few folders are
visible (and have "_sbd" appended to their name and their contents are gone).
I attempted to restore the ~/.local/share/evolution directory from the backup
done before the upgrade but it didn't help: at first in the "inbox" I saw
all the many e-mails that should've been (while other folders remained empty)
but after closing the Evolution and restarting it all old e-mails disappeared
leaving only the few that arrived after the upgrade. When I look at the directory
~/local/share/evolution/mail/local
I see files with names of all of the old mail folders so I'm assuming the contents
of the mail folders are still there but for some reason the new Evolution refuses
to see them. What can be done about it? Does Evolution keps some info outside
the ~/.local/share/evolution directory?

TIA for any help,
kaza.