Running 2.6.27 on F11 instead of 2.6.29

[john wendel]

Suvayu Ali wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I wanted to check with you whether this is feasible before I attempted 
> it. I use a ATI HD4870 so I _need_ the proprietary drivers for a working 
> GUI. However they don't support 2.6.29 yet. So I was advised on the 
> RPMFusion list, that if I really wanted to upgrade to F11, I install F11 
> downgrade the kernel to 2.6.27 and use akmod.
> 
> I had some concerns about the use of stronger hashes[1] in F11, but I 
> was told they are backwards compatible. So my question is, would 
> installing F11 and using the F10 kernel rpms to downgrade the kernel to 
> 2.6.27 to use proprietary drivers from RPMFusion along with akmod be 
> good idea?
> 
> I want to upgrade mostly because of XFCE 4.6. I wanted to get rid of 
> Gnome completely and move to XFCE and Windowmaker. Gnome is too slow 
> even on high-end hardware like mine. Sometimes simply opening Firefox or 
> Thunderbird takes ages(5-10s). If someone were to tell me XFCE 4.6 would 
> be available in F10 I would abandon all this jumping through hoops right 
> away. :)
> 
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
> 

You don't need to upgrade to try XFCE 4.6. I'm running XFCE 4.6 on an F8 
box. Just get the installer from the XFCE site and run it. You can 
install in a local directory under your home directory, so it won't 
touch anything else on your F10 system.

Then add the following it your .bash_profile :

   PATH=$HOME/bin:$HOME/xfce4.6/bin:$PATH

Switch to run-level 3 and run "startxfce4" and you're there.

I doubt that installing XFCE 4.6 is going to improve the speed of 
Firefox or Thunderbird. But it only costs a little time to give it a try.

Regards,

John