Rawhide First Impressions

[Martin Sourada]

Hi,

I've installed rawhide from the Live Spin (20070327 snapshot) and here
are my first assorted impressions.

The Live CD works pretty well, I noticed only one hickup during the
usage - gnome became somehow not responsible after turning on compiz... 

Installation went pretty well and I was impressed that it was faster
than ever before (it took about 5 mins excluding setting up). It seems
simpler than in previous fedoras.

The new First Boot seems to need some love in terms of graphics, but
from how it looks now, it seems it might be on schedule...

And now to the impressions of the work with rawhide itself:

Good impressions:
 * The new package kit package management is awesome and seems a lot
faster than pup/pirut.
 * Reworked system-config-services seem to have been gotten some love,
it's now quite straightforward to use :)
 * The system seems to boot quite fast, I didn't do any measurements
yet, but it seems it boots in less than one minute (using the services
setting from install).
 * The new date&time applet is really cool. I like that it can show
temperatures as well and the way how the time zone is set.
 * Swfdec works much better than in F8. Youtube videos finally plays
without quirks and so far even without crashes :)
 * The new gdm is a huge step forward. Finally there is smooth
transition from it to gnome session *THUMBS UP*
 * TeXLive (namely the csplain format) works nice.

Mixed feelings:
 * Seems like we are more permissive in what an ordinary user can do. I
opened some config dialogs without noticing, that I gained more
rights... while it simplifies life a lot I am not sure it's the right
thing to have it so much permissive by default...
 * Totem youtube plugin works, but totem cannot play the files, even
with all the gstreamer-* lot form livna installed.
 * The packagekit package management tool cannot import gpg certificate
for livna (so I had to install the first package in CLi via yum).
 * During yum transactions I'm getting 
error: failed to stat /home/martin/.gvfs: Permission denied 
but it does not seem to do any harm
 * When I looked into system monitor I noticed that gvfs-fuse-daemon
occupies nearly 7 GiB of my HDD space... Is there a way make the loss
smaller?

Bad impressions
 * Epiphany does not see any firefox plugins
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427369)
 * Epiphany does not have an option to remember filled passwords (this
is definitely a regression... dunno if there is a bug for it)
 * Video output (intel GMA 950) sucks. xv in mplayer does not work at
all, so I had to resort to x11 (does it know how to zoom videos??) and
gl2 (which is usable only for small videos, for big it's dreadfully
slow). Just for record this is the error:
X11 error: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)0.8% 0 0  
dunno if it's mplayer's fault or not
 * Compiz does not work (again regression). Starts fine, but after a
while freezes whole ui (well, freeze is a bit strong... the ui is just
not responsive and cursor stays the same), so I have to wait for the
dialog to timeout. If I happen to close the dialog prior to freeze,
killing X seems necessary...

Anyway, seems like rawhide is quite usable and has a lot of new awesome
futures, but also some annoying bugs. Can't wait for final :-D

Martin