[Mageia-discuss] First impressions of Beta2 (fresh installation)

[Wolfgang Bornath]

x86_64 dvd on a laptop (i3, 4Gb RAM, Atheros wifi, nvidia graphics),
DE selection: KDE

Only few things, minor and major:

- [minor] in first screens (ncurses) before the graphic installer the
lines are displayed as special characters, probably a charset issue
(has been reported by other)
- [minor] a translation of the ads during package installation
according to the language selection would be a "nice to have"
- [minor] bootloader setup does not recognize Ubuntu already present
on the same harddisk (Mageia 1 grub recognized it)

- [major] setting up wifi during installation (from the summary
screen) recognizes the atheros chip and available networks but does
not start the connection - long standing error, see
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452
- [major] caused by the previous bug no updates are possible during installation

After reboot:
- at first reboot system hangs after "Starting cpufre1 (via
systemctl): [ok]" - as there is no tty12 available (or any other) I
can not tell which task is stopping the process. Have to restart the
machine with Ctrl+Alt+Del! At second try the startup process went
through to kdm without failure. All reboots after this worked ok.
- [minor] selecting the Activity Manager display shows no background
graphic nor picture, just a black background - can be changed easily
but should be avoided.

- [success] after reboot wifi is available, sound working, major apps working
- [success] device manager recognizes USB keys & harddisk, data dvd,
music cd, etc.
- [success] using data dvd and windows 7 partitions via dolphin (and
MC) works out-of-the-box

Remark: After setting up package media the known bug with rpmdrake set
in. After erasing the lock files (2 of them) and the old __db files
AND rebuilding the rpm database AND updating rpmdrake (via urpmi) the
error is gone and rpmdrake is working ok - known bug, fixed by
rpmdrake update.

Remark 2: During installation the free nouveau graphic driver is
installed and works ok. After setting up package media (including
non-free and tainted) the installation of the proprietary nvidia
driver fails. Details:
 - I open MCC -> Hardware -> Configure graphics server and click on
the graphic card (selection is correct), then on OK. Normally there
should be a message box telling me that there is a proprietary driver
available. This message box is not displayed, the process ends as if
everything is ok.

 - started from a konsole window (XFdrake) the error message reads:

"The program 'XFdrake' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was: 'BadWIndow'.
(Details: serial 21486 error_code 3 request _code 153 minor_code 3)"

 - Now I go to tty2, login and open XFdrake on the CLI. This time the
message about the proprietary driver is shown and the usual procedure
(installing devel and dkms packages, building the module) works as
expected. After reboot the nvidia splash comes up and the performance
matches the proprietary driver.