RHL Severn - Initial Findings

[Matthew Winter]

Hi,

Having got my system fully working with RHL 9, only 2 months ago, I
decided that it was time for me to give something back to the community.
So I decided to join the Severn Beta trial.

Well here are my finidings:

As part of the install, I performed the CD check, even though CDRecorder
did not show any messages. It said the disks were fine, so I went ahead
with the install. However when the installer got to disk 2, it would not
read one of the packages, which meant I had to exit at this point,
reburn the CD and try again. Luckily it worked OK the second attempt.

Question : Why did the CD Check say there was nothing wrong with disk 2,
when clearly there was.

I decided intially it would make better sense to perform an upgrade
rather than a full install, since I had everything working.

This was my first mistake.

Once the installation was complete, I found that the system did not make
use of the new graphical boot. I assume the installer prefers to keep
the existing config in its entirity.

Once booted, I attempted to install the NVidia driver, rebuilding the
kernel. This failed as the NVidia driver performs a check of the CC
versions and found that they are compiled using an earlier release. I
assume NVidia will update there drivers when Severn goes into GA.

OK, so using the generic drivers, I logged into Gnome, attempted to make
use of Mozilla. Complete failure, no messages, just would not start.

I then attempted to resize the screen. The system at this point, did not
recognise the higher resultions, and only offered me a maximum of 800 x
600.

I then noticed that even though I have only installed possible 4
additional RPM's ontop of the original RHL 9, I had alot of package
dependency problems

Anyway, this went on for a bit, so I decided to go for a full reinstall
of the RHL Severn Beta.

Once this was complete, the graphical boot appeared, which I have to say
slows the boot process down quite considerably, at least twice as long.

All of the applications started to work again.

Two configuration problems. My DVD+RW stopped working, due to the
/dev/cdrom being pointed at /dev/hdc when it should have been /dev/sdc0.
Even though IDE-SCSI was installed, it did not fully configure the
system, when the RHL 9 did. The other problem is related to my sound
card not being noticed, which it was with RHL 9. Not got down to the
bottom of this one yet, but will in time.

The screen resolution program picked up the correct list of resultions,
however when I increased the resolution, I noticed the background does
not get correctly painted, and the apps running still think that the
screen size is alot smaller, which looks perculiar when the applications
are maximised, and only using the top left corner. Also resizing the
window, passed the old maximum limit, causes the window to start
painting in a very strange manner, effectively picking sizes out at
random. All of which clears up after a restart of X.

I noticed on the forum a comment about the fonts. Even though they look
clear, they do look as if they have been streteched to a thin version
when compared to RHL 9.

Nice to see alot more of the latest versions of software.

Do you think that version 1.1 of OpenOffice will be included before the
GA release.

Initial feelings are mixed, but the final outcome was good. Still got a
long way to go though.

Matthew