FC5 is good => FC6 must be better? Not: 3 days of grief and still not working properly. (OK this is evidence based on N=1. But it's the only laptop I have....)
I usually swear by linux and occasionally wear a tea shirts advertising it. (well known: “the box said windows 98 or better, so i installed linux”). This time I was only swearing at linux.
Short story:
Dell Inspiron 4000 PIII:
FC5 worked, FC6 doesn't. No sound, X11 problems at install, and a runaway beagle
Audio: ESS Technology ES19835 Maestro-31 PCI Audio Accelerator, driver: snd-maestro3
Video: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2x, driver: aty128fb
Long story:
A while ago i worked hard to get FC5 installed on an old laptop (Dell Inspirion 4000, PIII). There was then already a little problem with the proper graphics mode during installation but I could fix it then by specifying a particular resolution. After that, no real problems occurred, apart from a major hacking spell on installing wireless (using a USB card and running into problems with ndiswrapper that could be resolved -
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....php?t=433752).
Later I used a version of Stanton Finley's very practical and well documented installation notes (here is
a more recent version:
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...ion_notes.html) , and got all the multi-media to work that this laptop can support.
FC6 became available and I decided to try to update, since i like FC5, which also runs flawless on another desktop at home.
First I ran into the problem that the FC6 installer (DVD) wouldn't find ANY properly working resolution. I tried them all! It seemed to not even care: Somehow I suspect that the boot option, such as
boot> linux resolution=1024x786
is simply ignored. I always got a garbage screen.
Finally I tried to go through with updating from FC5 to FC6 anyways, using an almost unreadable screen. That crashed after a long time of racing the disk.
Now I was looking at a completely new installation which I expected should be easier. This time I used text mode. I could install everything but then the problem remained of how to get X11 to work from the startup? Yes, it is possible to use startx to bring up an X11 system and I could get a video mode to work (1400x1050) , but I can't find out how to make the thing bring up the login window.
Further, there is a menu item: Administration->Login Screen, to configure the login screen. However, the program that's behind it doesn't do anything. The main problem is that the audio isn't working. I checked that the most recent alsa drivers are installed, after complete updates over the internet, but what used to work without a problem in FC5 doesn't work now. So I have no sound. Further, even after shooting down a lot of services that I don't need on this laptop (no bluetooth etc), FC6 seems to be totally lame. In the end I find the main culprit of this may be the demon beagle-build-in which eats up CPU time, while creating endlessly the same error message. beagle or anything like that isn't listed as a service (system->administration->server settings->services) and I don't know how to stop it.
Audio: ESS Technology ES19835 Maestro-31 PCI Audio Accelerator, driver: snd-maestro3
Video: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2x, driver: aty128fb