worth upgrading/ installing?

[Georgios Petasis]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Craig White" <craigwhite at azapple.com>
To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list at redhat.com>; "Georgios 
Petasis" <petasisg at yahoo.gr>
Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2006 7:04 PM
Subject: Re: worth upgrading/ installing?


> On Sat, 2006-03-25 at 18:50 +0200, Georgios Petasis wrote:
>> My personal experience is:
>>
>> 1) I upgraded my working FC4 to FC5 from the DVD. It took
>> a very long time. The resulting system didn't work.
>> (Random freezes in X, various random crashes, even in yum!).
> ----
> while this might work for some, it should work, it may not work and it
> likely is affected by things that are installed that didn't come from
> fedora core

As I have red some posts around about the nvidia drivers, Ithought
that this may be the problem. This is why I proceeded on a
new installtion.

> ----
>>
>> 2) I formated the partition, and installed FC5 from scratch.
>> The result is again a non-working system. Crashes do not
>> happen any more, but the system randomly locks under X.
>> If you don't want a desktop, you are fine :-)
> ----
> It's not as if you have given us anything to go on except for a
> reference to using GUI login as root which is not recommended.

Well, I didn't suggest to run your desktop as root  for every-day use:-)
But for finding problems, I think its a good idea to not having to
type the root password after some time to run the various configuration
tools.

>
> There are logs you can check for clues...
>
> /var/log/messages
> dmesg
> /var/log/Xorg.0.log

The sad think is that I have looked all of these, and I didn't found 
anything
wrong in there...

>
> but if you want to generalize on your experiences, go right ahead.

On the contrary, information about failures is much more important
than success ones. I didn't generalised anything, I just reported my
own experience. I am a redhat/fedora user since redhat 4 and in general
I had never faced any problems so far, except in two releases: the 64-bit of
fedora core 2, and the 32-bit of fedora core 5 (x86).

> ----
>>
>> And all these, on a (previously) working FC4 system.
>> No, I thnk it was foolish to upgrade. I suggest you to
>> wait untill all these issues are solved.
> ----
> obviously most people are not having the same issues so it would be
> likely that it has something to do with your hardware or possibly
> something you are doing in configuration that is causing issues.

I am still trying to see what is happening. While the hardware problem
is always open, the system is fairly new and has a few working hours
(as it is my back-up machine). The mainboard is a gigabyte GA-K8NNXP
with nForce3 150 chipset, with 2x512MB kingston value ram (which
has been tested with memtest86 many times). The disk is a plain
120GB ATA WD one and the graphics card is an old MSI with nvidia
Geforce 2 MX-200 with 32 MB ram. Finally, a 500 W power supply from
Antec. The machine was running just fine untill the FC5 install.

Now, from my ignorant testings, I think that the locks relate to using
KDE as the desktop (which I prefer). The locks do not seem to happen
when using gnome. Also, the locks *also* happen when I use KDE
inside a VNC server, so I am not so sure that the problem relates to the
graphics card (Xvnc is not related to any graphic card, isn't it?).
It wasn't SELinux as I had initially thought... Are there any KDE
FC5 users? Do they have similar problems? I tried to run KDE
with my FC4 config files & with a new user (without config files) and
I got a lock in both cases. And with lock I mean a complete freeze
of the machine: it does not respond to network, mouse or keyboard.
Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing. Even caps lock does nothing. I have to reset
the machine when I reach there. And there is no mention of this in any
of the logs...

Regarding configuration, I have't changed much the default configuration.
Host name, IP addresses, screen resolution...

>
> Waiting for the initial issues to be resolved is never a bad idea
> though.
> ----
>>
>> Also, it would be good if anybody can suggest me on how
>> to get help on this, as I don't have a worning linux box any more.
>> Where should I look? How to find out why my kernel locks?
> ----
> I would start with the above logs

I cannot find anything in the logs :-( I can place them on a web server if
anybody wants to see them, but it may be a waste of time :-)