FC5T2 and Development issues, observations, and questions

[Nathan Grennan]

  Overall I am a lot happier with what I experienced installing FC5T2 
compared to the FC5T1. The difference was night and day. Thank you for 
all the hard work people.

  Now for a list of issues, observations, and questions.

1. I noticed that the options to enabled or disable the firewall and 
selinux are now in firstboot. This created a situation where I filed a 
bug on httpd about large file support. In the end I figured out it was 
really selinux, but I had disabled selinux during firstboot. The problem 
came with the fact I hadn't rebooted. Overall I think the trend to 
moving everything to firstboot is a bad one, but I don't expect to be 
able to change the developers minds'.

2. What is up with x86_64 kernels always being SMP enabled? I noticed a 
comment in the release notes, but no reason given as to why. I would 
think this could be problematic for debugging unless there is some boot 
option that makes the kernel act 100% like it would with a UP kernel.

3. Where are the x86_64 Xen 3.0 kernels? All I see are i686 in 
development. I am really looking forward to playing with Xen 3.0 on my 
dual core x86_64 desktop.

4. What is up with the return of mdadm.conf? I started with a FC4 system 
with a /, /boot, and /home partition. I told anaconda to format / and 
/boot, while ignoring /home. I told it to ignore home because that is 
where I backed up all the data. I then finished installing FC5T2. After 
booting for the first time I setup /home in fstab, it is /dev/md2. I 
then rebooted and got an error about /dev/md2. After digging into the 
problem I found udev was not creating the file /dev/md2. I thought of 
mdadm.conf from the past, and looked in it. Sure enough it existed and 
mentioned md0 and md1. I added md2, and then /home would mount properly 
on boot. I thought we had gotten rid of the need for mdadm.conf.

5. I am ecstatic to see that the sky2 network card driver made into the 
development kernels. I had been using netdev kernels, and after 
installed FC5T2 I was going to have to merge in netdev patches into 
development kernel.

6. I wanted to install galeon.i386 from extras, and it needed to install 
mozilla.i386. Being that I am running x86_64, mozilla.x86_64 was already 
installed. For some reason mozilla.i386 refused to install, because it 
said /usr/bin/mozilla and /usr/share/man/man1/mozilla.1.gz conflicted 
with mozilla.x86_64. Both are mozilla-1.7.12-3. Is this a bug in the 
package? Is this a bug in rpm? I originally used yum and got the error, 
but then I tried rpm directly and received the same error message.

7. Frecell doesn't start, and I have already filed a bug, 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=177886

8. Beagled, which is required to use Beagle, won't start. Here is the 
bug report, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=177887

9. Currently after recent development updates multiple panel applets 
crash on login, and one crashes on log out.

10. Anaconda's dependency code may be a little screwy. I am pretty sure 
I had told it to install beagle during the package selection. I think I 
deselect one of it's dependencies. Instead of installing the dependency 
anyway so that it could install beagle, it seemed to not install either. 
Another possibility is that the package selection code is just buggy. I 
did notice that the selection display was new. I am happy to see it's 
return after the lack of a decent one in FC5T1.