F-12 upgrade experience with Dell D630

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 13:31 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>> As the Dell Latitude D630 is one of the more common devices that smolt
>> >>> reports being used by Fedora I thought I'd mention my upgrade
>> >>> experience and issues for F-12.
>> >>>
>> >>> Probably the two usual things that people query are grahics and wifi.
>> >>> The model I have has the Intel IWL-4965AGN device which as expected
>> >>> works fine.
>> >>>
>> >>> I'm having a few issues with the nouveau driver with plymouth in that
>> >>> it doesn't work at all but if I remove all the options from the kernel
>> >>> boot line it gets to X and apart from some initial corruption as GDM
>> >>> comes up its OK from there. I have no idea how to debug this.
>> >>
>> >> Try adding the parameter 'nomodeset' instead of removing any parameters.
>> >> What happens then?
>> >
>> > It has certainly improved it. I wasn't in front of the machine as it
>> > booted this morning so I'll need to check out plymouth this evening
>> > but the responsiveness of the display is improved and I don't get
>> > duplicate mouse pointers now. The performance seems reduced compared
>> > to F-11 though :-(
>> >
>> >>> Probably the most annoying is the breakage of sound. This seems to
>> >>> have every other kernel/alsa/pulseaudio update and was an issue on and
>> >>> off right through F-11 as well so its not exactly surprising but also
>> >>> disappointing that one of the most common devices running Fedora has
>> >>> sound broken on a semi regular basis. Again some pointers in debugging
>> >>> this so it can be fixed by F-12 final would be great.
>> >>
>> >> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bug_info_kernel_sound
>> >>
>> >>> The only other very minor issue I see is that the icon spacing on the
>> >>> gnome panels is massive!
>> >>
>> >> This is currently being 'enthusiastically' discussed on
>> >> fedora-desktop-list. :)
>> >
>> > Thanks for the pointer. I noticed its also been tweaked in todays rawhide.
>> >
>> > I've also noticed of late that yum performance has gone through the floor too.
>>
>> I never finished that. Its currently necking one core of a 2.5 ghz
>> penryn and using nearly a gig of RAM. It literally now takes hours to
>> update my Fit-PC (500mhz geode with 256Mb RAM).
>
> Geode GX2/500 has basically zero cache (either L1 or L2), and 256MB is
> really the bare minimum for the install/upgrade process.  You'll be
> swapping to disk a lot during the upgrade while the depsolving goes on,
> and yeah, it'll take quite a while.

Yea, but my Dell with a Centrino penryn processor with 6 meg of cache
and 4 gig of RAM was horrific and earlier in F-12 it wasn't that bad
even on the Geode. I couldn't use my Dell for over 20 mins while doing
a single days worth of the current rawhide pushes.

Peter