[Mageia-discuss] Alpha 3 snapshot

[Juergen Harms]

Following the good advice from Morgan (network install) I have now been 
able to make a clean install with all the latest updates and to go 
through all the steps I normally do to customize and verify my 
production system. A couple of interesting points, here is the lot:

1. After this minimum install, I habe been unable to create media of 
type file (urpmi.addmedia): although urpmi had been correctly installed, 
genhdlist2 was missing - I guess a dependency of urpmi on genhdlist2 is 
missing.

2. Korganizer installs and runs well, but importing an existing .vcs 
calendar does not work: Korganizer finds the file with the existing 
calendar, but then creates an empty new calendar of that name - does not 
import the contents of the existing calendar

3. I was positively surprised: printer installation - often a problem 
with new releases - went quite well. Printer detection (hp laserjet MP 6 
on the parallel port and networked hp deskjet 6127) without any problem. 
However (for both), finding the driver was a funny business: took far 
too much time, and iterated between "searching for driver", short flash 
of some other window, and again "searching for driver", but with some 
patience the result turned out OK.

4. Another positive surprise: both lighttpd and backuppc services got 
started as they should, no problem with systemd (except see 5)

5. Service control with drkconf.real -> System -> Manage system services 
practically does not work. Start and Stop do not seem to have much 
effect (and no feedback on the running/stopped indication); but the "On 
boot" button seems to do what it is supposed to do). But the whole thing 
appears to be shaky, it happened ( once, I did not make an effort to 
reproduce the problem) that the services window came up with all "On 
boot" buttons unchecked - correct display after a re-boot. The service 
control facility of drakconf.real certainly still needs some debugging. 
I dont know whether the command-line alternative (/etc/inet.d/<service> 
<action> is still supposed to work under systemd, for the services I 
dealt with it does not.

6. Several packages which use Gtk (started from a console) display an 
error message when they start: "ldconfig: /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 is not 
a symbolic link"

7. The geda packages which I am maintaining (and which worked under 
Alpha 1 now throw - mostly Gtk and oxygen related - errors, I will have 
to re-dig and rebuild these packages). That may be a warning to other 
package maintainers who did their homework early: packages built under 
Alpha1 dont necessarily work any more.

8. Sometime soon after boot, there is practically alway a notification 
popup saying "Error while initializing DBus, Disabling the service"

9. System Shutdown is going from bad to worse - earlier, it most times 
just got stuck - now after some initial screen waggling, the desktop 
activates again. I have ended up to do "reboot" from Konsole.

10. The random console switching problem is still there, but the 
workaround suggested is OK.

11. KDE
- the taskbar now has a vertically graded background - very light gray 
at its top, rather dark gray at its bottom - apparenly not configurable; 
the dark gray at the bottom results in far too little contrast with dark 
fonts and makes the lower part of the taskbar difficult to read, with 
light fonts the opposite - nice look, but user-unfriendly.

- the titlebar (Oxygen) still has no colour, distinguishing the active 
window from inactive windows is still difficult

- creating popup menu buttons in the taskbar still does not work - a 
show stopper for me.

This using Alpha 3 in-spite of all took so much time that I now have to 
catch up with other stuff that got left behind - no time left for 
distilling these issues into bug reports. But I hope that this snapshot 
helps; and I will, as Marja suggested, make comments in the already 
existing bugzilla reports to clarify that the bugs are still open and, 
where adequate, insist on their importance.