[Mageia-dev] Feedback on Mageia 3 beta1

[Davy Defaud]

Dear Mageia packagers,

Now that it's time for polishing, I'd like to give a feedback on my own
experience with mga3 beta1.

I've installed a mga3 beta1 x86_64 (DVD GNOME install) as soon as it has
been released on a brand new SSD (one of my two 6 year old 320MB old
disks mounted as a striped LVM was agonizing and corrupting my
filesystems...). Here's a (not so) quick review of my installation.
As I wanted something modern, simple and performant, I decided to give a
try to btrfs as my root partition without separated /boot (hence why I
was a waiting beta1 for GRUB2) nor /var and, of course these days, no
/usr neither. My /home remains in ext4, as I'm aware of the btrfs' fsck
not considered as something reliable enough...

First of all, I've noticed that when you choose a customized size for a
partition, each time you edit the size (resize button) of a partition
and then cancel without any change, the size is decremented by a couple
of MB. Not a blocking bug though, but it should be fixed, IMHO.
I've also noticed that the installer hasn't automatically proposed GRUB2
as the default bootloader, whereas my root partition wasn't accessible
from GRUB legacy and I had no independent ext3 /boot. Of course, this
shouldn't be a problem if GRUB2 becomes the default bootloader for the
final mga3...
The rest of the installation went seamlessly and brought me to GDM.

However, after the installation there were some "anomalies":

- my kernel was the server version one (kernel-server), even though I
haven't selected any server configuration ;

- more annoying, there was no syslog daemon and I had to install rsyslog
by myself. It seems that none of the core packages is requiring a syslog
daemon (unless systemd is supposed to handle the syslog in a way I'm not
aware of);

- I was unable to mount a CD/DVD as a normal user, but only as root. A
really annoying bug (#8405) for end users IMHO, but I finally found a
simple stupid solution: get rid of the cdrom entry generated in the
fstab and let the magic udev/udisks do the trick! This cdrom entry
should probably not be generated by the installer anymore...

- I own a DVB card, but its firmware (dvb-fe-tda10046.fw) is not
provided by any mga package. We used to find it in a Mandriva PLF rpm
before. It would be nice for end users to find it in a Mageia package
somehow. Moreover, the module and its dependencies (saa7134,
saa7134_dvb, saa7134_alsa) don't work after resuming from suspend.
Unfortunately, a dedicated script in /etc/pm/sleep.d/ doesn't help since
it doesn't seem to be called. But anyway, this bug should have been
fixed for a long time as a patch has been proposed to the kernel
subsystem maintainer (Mauro Carvalho Chehab), but... see the most
interesting part of the story here:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.video-input-infrastructure/46854
Perhaps Thomas, our dear kernel master, could include it in the next mga
kernel, so I could give my feedback on the patch?...

- Another very annoying thing too is that some packages (easytag, and
also thunar when installing XFCE although you choose nautilus as your
favorite filemanager) are replacing Nautilus for handling folders and
mounted removable drives (SDcard, USB key...). The fix is to remove
these "inode/directory" entries of the desktop files in
/usr/share/applications/ and also from
/usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache (or at least put nautilus.desktop
as the first one in mimeinfo.cache) ;

- Still no easy way to convert my Bluetooth DiNovo keyboard & mouse
combo into a generic purpose Bluetooth receiver (the usual fix doesn't
work at all: neither hiddev* nor hidraw* in
/lib/udev/rules.d/97-bluetooth-hid2hci.rules is working anymore)...

- Default GTK+ configuration seems to be "non standard" (gtk-theme-name
is set to oxygen-gtk and gtk-icon-theme-name is set to oxygen-gtk both
in /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc/ and /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini instead of
respectively "Adwaita" and "gnome") causing some glitches (for example,
when you change the volume with mutimedia keys, the OSD sound volume
background image is missing and replaced by an ugly gray) ;

- grub2 + early plymouth experience remains not very good, we are still
far from a flicker free boot. Resolutions are limited to 4:3 ratios and
up to 1600×1200 (my display is a 16:10 1920×1200 driven by a free r300g
KMS driver), but I guess this kind of things belongs to upstream. For
instance, although grub2 is configured as graphical and quiet, I'm still
seeing some text mode screens during the boot. Isn't plymouth supposed
to avoid it?

- mediatomb has to be patched in order to work with the recent Samsung
SmartTV models (2012 "E" series like the UE46E7000). I've rebuilt our
latest package applying the patch (found here:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3532724&group_id=129766&atid=715782)
and, after some tweakings in the config file (custom_header and changes
for mkv mime-type) and the firewall rules, it now plays successfully
everything I tested.

- GDM dialogs (or pam ones) are still not localized (passord, login
errors...), but I guess it's normal for a beta1...

Last thing, I think it would be smart to install or suggest, some
packages that could be considered essential to any kind of installation
(at least those connected to a network, i.e. 99.9%). For instance:
- bash-completion;
- ntp;
- ssh.

Please, let me know which of the reported problems deserve some bugzilla
entries. And I apologize if you think my post is too long or irrelevant
for this mailing list.

HTH,

Davy