[Mageia-dev] First impression on Cauldron

Mitya mitya at mageia.org
Fri Feb 10 01:17:44 CET 2012


Hi,

It's only now that I'm installing Cauldron for the first time (yep, I
know, shame on me!)
In a few words - you've done a great job guys! The distro is quite
usable, Alpha 3 DVD installs without a glitch. Upgrade from Alpha 3 to
Cauldron also went smooth, with the exception of some failing %post
scripts (namely, for at, cronie and speech-dispatcher). Though, of
course, I've found several issues, which I decide to dump here first,
prior to filing Bugzilla bugs. Maybe somebody recognizes the bugs that
have already been reported. So, here we go:

1) URPMI didn't work with DVD media after installation, complaining on
some udisks problem. After upgrade to Cauldron, though, everything seems
to be OK;
2) Totem was not capable of playing any single video from my collection,
until I've installed gstreamer0.10-{ffmpeg,faad,a52dec,dts}. Probably
these packages should be suggested by totem, because video player is
pretty useless without codecs;
3) adding a VPN interface in GNOME 3 network settings doesn't work. And
I wonder why doesn't it allow to add broadband or PPPoE connection? Is
it just unimplemented or what?
4) Russian input in framebuffer console doesn't work, and I remember it
worked pretty good in Mandriva. /etc/sysconfig/i18n contents are the
same. Ctrl-right/left command line navigation in bash doesn't work, too;
5) if any /etc/fstab entry becomes unavailable (for example, after
secondary disk having been pulled out), the system fails to boot - first
waiting for about a minute, and then bailing into a recovery console;
6) network-up service slows down boot process, always waiting for about
a minute and failing afterwards. The network is actually up and running.
Had to disable it with chkconfig;
7) audio is suspended when you switch to console from X (unless you are
logged on to this console). This affects Rhythmbox, Totem and any other
application that plays back audio (play, paplay, ffplay etc.). This is
due to ConsoleKit doing nasty things to /dev/snd/* entries' ACLs (though
adding a user to "audio" group doesn't help either). The problem is
described in detail here:
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/multimedia/464721-audio-stops-playing-when-switching-console-xorg.html
8) after upgrading to Cauldron, gnome-terminal started to pop up a menu
upon pressing F10 (to quit Midnight Commander, for example - this can be
very annoying), though accessing menu with F10 is turned off in the
profile;
9) Cantarell font, used by default in GNOME Shell, doesn't cover
Cyrillic glyphs at all, so for Russian messages it gets substituted with
default sans-serif font. This mixture of fonts looks really ugly. Maybe
some other quality free font could be considered when using Cyrillic
locales, like, for example, PT Sans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Sans
10) sending mails in Evolution is broken - Evolution (3.3.5) doesn't remember authentication settings for SMTP anymore;
11) finally, the least significant, but the most annoying for me - can't
turn off NumLock in GNOME! Neither with the NumLock key itself, nor with
numlockx. The LED just dims for a fraction of second, and goes back
again tauntingly :)

So, if anyone notices an issue that has already been reported, please
let me know so I don't file a duplicate. Again, thanks guys for great
distro! Won't be coming back to Mandriva :)

Mitya






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