After a day on Fedora Core 4, test 1, I've had my fill. I performed a "complete" install from the DVD on my Lifebook and that all went quite well. Complete seems to take about 7 GB of space :-)
Things seemed to be going OK at first, then I notices that my fans were screaming and when I checked top I saw that the CPU was pegged by gdm and syslog. A reboot didn't cure this ill so, with Johnny's help, I turned it off and dropped back to a console boot and manually starting X.
Once I got up again, my fans started screaming again and checking top, I saw some other process chewing up CPU. I forgot what it was, something about linking (and I wasn't compiling or anything like that). Not interested in tracking that down, I just bailed :-)
I'm hoping that these issues were unique to my install or laptop but I'm happy falling back to FC3 and I'll be patiently awaiting FC4 test 2.
Posted by asa at March 22, 2005 11:19 AMThanks for the info! I need to do a fresh install and was debating between FC3 and FC4T1. Your problems may be an isolated incident, but I'm taking it as a sign nonetheless. :)
Posted by: toby on March 22, 2005 11:34 AMyou might have run into prelinking
Most common applications make use of shared libraries. These shared libraries need to be loaded into memory at runtime and the various symbol references need to be resolved. For most small programs this dynamic linking is very quick. But for programs written in C++ and that have many library dependencies, the dynamic linking can take a fair amount of time.
On most systems, libraries are not changed very often and when a program is run, the operations taken to link the program are the same every time. Prelink takes advantage of this by carrying out the linking and storing it in the executable, in effect prelinking it. In order for the linker, you need ld-linux.so in glibc; to recognize the prelinking you need >=glibc-2.3.1-r2.
Prelinking can cut the startup times of applications. For example, a typical KDE program's loading time can be cut by as much as 50%. The only maintenance required is re-running prelink every time a library is upgraded for a pre-linked executable.
http://www.crast.us/james/articles/prelink.php
Posted by: Tmbeihl on March 22, 2005 11:42 AMHave you tried ubuntu yet?
Posted by: jr on March 22, 2005 11:45 AMI would also second the notion for Ubuntu, despite their dark brown color palette, they seem to be the user-friendly distribution, surpassing Fedora. If you're the type to try f4test1, then Ubuntu 4.12 or even 5.04 preview shouldn't be a problem for you. (they have date-based versions, 2004 dec, and 2005 apr.)
Posted by: Simplex on March 22, 2005 12:36 PMWow! I thought you were a Windows guy! Nice to see that you run Fedora!
Unfortunately, FC4 Test1 is a little mess, but I'm sure the 2nd test release will be very good!
mcg, I'm a cross platform guy. I run Windows, Linux, and Mac (I even have and OS/2 install.)
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on March 22, 2005 12:51 PMAsa, run up2date, the gdm slowdown has been fixed in a newer rpm release.
Try vidalinux. It is based on gentoo, but most of the packages are already compiled. It is the fastest distro I ever found!
Posted by: Nova on March 22, 2005 06:14 PMYou seriously should try Ubuntu some time. I've tested a lot of different distros and when comparing them, they are very similar in installation, usage and maintenance, but Ubuntu is better in all three areas, especially maintenance.
Posted by: David Tenser on March 22, 2005 11:16 PMI don't know why everyone falls back to the "brown" theme w/ ubuntu as a major downfall. I think it looks good you don't... good thing its the easiest thing in the world to change.
Changing it to the other default themes like Clearlook which include blue and greens takes approximatley 3 mouse clicks.
Posted by: jr on March 22, 2005 11:21 PMAnd if you're trying Ubuntu, don't forget to give MEPIS Linux a chance too. :-)
It's ranking surprisingly high on DistroWatch (#4?) for the little attention it has been getting (for some reason, Ubuntu seem to gain more). I'm dual-booting with it myself right now, and to me it feels like an extremely clean and simple to use distro. It comes on 1 bootable Live CD where the distro can be installed on your hard drive from within the desktop.
Posted by: Jugalator on March 23, 2005 12:35 PMI installed FC4T1 the day after it came out (because virtually none of the mirrors had it on the day of release, ho hum) and it's a dog's dinner, even for a test release. The media check at the start of the installer is broken (so you have to manually "sha1sum" your ISO downloads) and reports FAIL despite it actually really being a PASS. The installer fails to run "firstboot" at all, only creating a root user, which isn't good. gdm reports some "Can't set EGID to user GID" error literally millions of times, which soaks up both CPU itself and, of course, for poor old syslogd, which is equally battered. "init 3", "yum update gdm" and "init 5" should fix that, but I was so surprised that this problem wasn't spotted prior to the FC4T1 release that I've not checked out what else is wrong and will wait for FC4T2 instead. There's a full thread on all the main issues here if you want further reading:
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=47711
Posted by: Richard Lloyd on March 23, 2005 03:53 PM"Once I got up again, my fans started screaming ..."
You sure this isn't just wishful thinking? ;-)
Vidalinux didn't work for me. It was impossible to get an Internet connection, even when using every single tip I found on the web. The network manager would hang for half a minute and then tell me I wasn't connected. Back to Ubuntu and WinXP I went. :-)
Posted by: Foxtrot on March 25, 2005 06:01 AM