I’ve updated my Smolt profile for the laptop, it’s here.
Since this laptop has an Intel 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (I have no idea which one it actually is 😉 ), I tried kernel modesetting by adding i915.modeset=1 to the kernel boot line in /etc/grub.conf. At first it seemed to work just right and it seems to be a really nice feature. But after some usage I started to see weird font issues every now and then, all of the characters weren’t drawn completely, some parts were missing. Now that I’ve disabled kernel modesetting again, I have not seen any of these issues, but the boot looks much uglier now 😀 . I’m looking forward to this stuff becoming more widely used in the future. I have to mention that drawing stuff on to the screen in X seems to have slowed down quite a bit with the upgrade. I can’t say anything very specific, but for example doing a cat /var/log/messages is much slower and uses more CPU than it used to. Someone else has noticed it as well. I think this might be the reason why the laptop is running a bit hotter than it used to.
The IPW2200 error messages I mentioned in my previous post are gone now. Maybe it was the kernel update that fixed it…
I also updated to KDE 4.0.4 from updates-testing. It seems to work quite nicely now, especially after I switched the new menu to the more traditional one. I still have the new menu on the desktop, though, just because you can’t add new icons to the desktop or the panel via the old style menu with the right mouse button. The most visible problem I see now is the clock. If I add the date to the clock, I can’t actually see the date at all, because it goes so low it’s already out of the display 😀 . The tray icons are also sometimes acting weirdly, as I wrote in my previous entry, but I’ll keep an eye on that. Oh, and I keep using compositing with KWin. I’ve had problems with GNOME’s compositing, but in KDE it works great and looks nice 🙂 .
Now that I mentioned updates-testing, there’s also one issue related to it. When I first did yum --enablerepo updates-testing check-update, it only showed me some Fedora 8 updates. Even doing yum clean all didn’t help. There was recently some talk about his in the #fedora-devel channel, so it might be a common issue. I did an rm -r /var/cache/yum/*, but apparently yum --enablerepo updates-testing clean all could also help.
Now that Fedora 9 has OpenJDK, I removed Sun’s proprietary Java, which I had installed in /opt/, changed the java binary to the free one by running alternatives --config java, removed an sh script in /etc/profile.d/ which set the java paths to the proprietary JDK and removed the symbolic link to the proprietary java plugin I had in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/. I also installed the java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel and java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin packages, so now I should have quite a complete open java stack. It’s not yet quite the same as the proprietary JDK, but it looks very promising. Here’s a Red Hat Magazine article about OpenJDK.
The tapping functionality in touchpads has been disabled in Fedora 9. Axel Thimm gave advice on how to get it working again in this bug and now I have tapping working again. I’m not going to get into the discussion of whether or not this was a good thing, but having worked with the Docs team for a while, this would have needed a release note. The developer responsible for this change just probably forgot, since I don’t think the Docs team even knew about the change. Well, such is life… I also put syndaemon -k into my /etc/rc.local file, so that the touchpad will now be disabled when I’m using the keyboard. Syndaemon could be configurable as a service, though.
I guess that’s it for now, I may report more about my Fedora 9 experiences later…
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