I've gotten into the habit of skipping every other fedora release since that lets me skip doing upgrades every year.  I feel  a little more productive that way.  Most especially since I have lots of boxes at home doing special things (development, httpd staging, mythtv servers and frontends, etc).  Well, time flies and it's time to upgrade once again.  This time I'm going from f7 to f9.

I upgraded a system at work first.  My primary development box.  Everything went fairly easily there (at least initially, see below) so I did my laptop and development / httpd staging server at home.  Those also went well, but they have the least specialized items on them.  I haven't done the MythTV servers and frontends yet.

So what do I think of F9?  So far, it's a mixed reaction.  I've found lots of changes that I'm not crazy about.  For one, the inittab file has been somewhat deprecated (mostly) and the init.d scripts expanded.  Why they moved things out of inittab I don't know.  In my experience you don't change the design of something that works unless the design prevents you from doing something better.  Inittab was fairly simplistic and, by design, flexible.  You can do just about anything from inittab if you need to.  And one of the things we've always done is launch the SysV init scripts (/etc/rc.d/rc.X, where X is 0-6).  This pretty much covers the range of things you can do at startup.  So why did they pull things like starting ttys out of inittab?  Consistency?  Maybe, but that's not sufficient reason to change the design.  By moving things out of inittab all they're doing is deprecating the basic purpose of inittab.  I don't see the value.

Let's ignore the inittab issue for now and look at the desktop.  Fedora, despite the claims by Red Hat, is doing lots of work on the desktop.  gnome continues to grow (or bloat, as I see it) and evolve (or break, as I see it).   Some people will find this helpful.  Maybe not grandma, but perhaps semi-educated users.  But not me.  And probably not alot of technical users.

Up till this release I've never had any problems with GNOME sans, perhaps, general configuration changing from release to release.  But this release ran into a snag, in part because of a buggy NVidia driver which seemed to expose a bug in Metacity and, in turn, Bug-Buddy.  What happened (and this has only occurred on one machine, at work, which is using the nvidia provided X drivers) is that I would randomly loose all desktop interaction other than moving the mouse.  The desktop was still running – the GNOME panel's System Monitor applet was still moving – but I couldn't access anything on the desktop.  I couldn't use the keyboard or change workspaces or click on anything.   This problem showed up 4 times in 2 days, three on the first day and the last being the one that sent me over the edge (see below for my switch from GNOME).

Logging in from another host I round that Metacity was running but so was Bug Buddy with Metacity as it's reason.  Bug Buddy is that annoying little tool that pops up to ask if you want to report the problem with the application that just died.  But for reasons I'm not clear on – I think it has to do with the buggy NVidia driver, which I've since upgraded and the problem has not (yet) returned – Bug Buddy never opened it's window.  I tried killing Bug Buddy but it kept coming back.  I tried killing Metacity and that just caused an additional occurrence of Bug Buddy to start.  All of this was visible only because I could ssh into the machine and perform the actions and view the response using the ps command.

In the end I was stuck wih killing the server (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, which did work) and logging in again.  The moral here is:  save your work often.  Very often.  I didn't lose anything but I sure was scared I was going to.

Upgrading the NVidia driver may have fixed this problem.  I believe NVidia was the root cause because the same problem occurred (sans the Bug Buddy issue) when I switched to XFce.   I'm sticking with xfce, however, because at least when the NVidia problem arises I'm not stuck in an endless loop thinking “I can still save it”, like some underpaid fighter jock from the '50s in an experimental plane.  No, with XFce, when the NVidia driver locks up, none of the desktop applications crash.  Check one plus for XFce over GNOME.

There is another check for XFce:  no GVFS.  This new “feature” of GNOME is a user-specific mount point under the users HOME directory where the desktop can have access to things the user normally wouldn't have access to.  Apparently tools related to file browsers need this.  Well, I don't use file browsers.  Not nautilus or XFce's file browser or any other.  I'm an old fart and the terminal prompt and aliases wrapped around “ls” and options are sufficient for me.  I don't use drag and drop to open files in applicaitons.  I use “File->Open” when needed.  Or vi (who needs anything other than text files anyway?).

But the real problem with GVFS has to do with file access.  This damned directory gave fits to my rsync backups.  I finally managed to get rid of the errors from rsync by using an –exclude-from file (the syntax wouldn't work right with –exclude filename for some reason).  This may be a problem with rsync, but I view it as a problem with GVFS because something that worked fine before stopped working because the desktop changed on my upgrade.  I've been FORCED to deal with their change.

Another pain in the ass feature is the security lock down on the desktop.  There was a time when “xhost +hostname” was all that was needed to allow another system to display on your screen.  Now you have to muck with SELinux (a royal pain in the ass for the average user, no matter how useful a security tool it may be) and gdm.  In F7 it was just GDM that had gotten in the way but there was a nice graphical interface to disable the lockdown.  Now you have to hand edit a gdm configuration file along with mucking with SELinux.  Personally, I just disable SELinux and hope the firewall keeps me safe (probably not, but I'll deal with the break ins with another method).

Here's a note to all you pimply faced GNOME hackers:  change is bad.  It's damned evil.  And rewriting something from scratch for the desktop because it don't fit your ideal is bad.  We old folks (most especially grandma and her realm of unwashed anti-techites) don't give a rats ass why GVFS solves the problem you were trying to solve.  If it changes how they do things, they won't be happy.

And now that I'm an old fart (though not a grand dad – hopefully that's years away), I don't like change either.  Geez, I miss the days of FVWM.  I thought a desktop for linux would be a good thing.  I'm not so convinced anymore.  To hell with world domination.  Just make it work like it used to.