Fedora oddities, the good and the bad and the ugly

This was a while ago now, in the mean time FC2 came out,and I'm keeping my notes on that here

And then here's my fedora3 notes, followed by fedora4 notes, and the latest fedora5 notes. fedora6 notes. fedora9 notes.

the obvious

1. there are no installation manuals yes, though it's sufficiently close to RH9 that it didn't bother me, with one exception: the installation of X has been simplified, but there is no more option to NOT start at runlevel 5. I had to manually edit /etc/inittab and set it to 3.

the good

1. Dell I8200 w/ NVIDIA card: although version 4496 didn't install by default, after setting the environment variable IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH, as suggested by the failure logfile, it did finally compile a correct module, and the i have a working X driver again. See also moongroup.
2. the 'Move to workspace' window button now only moves the window, not the workspace. I actually prefer that. Perhaps it's a configuration option in Gnome now.
3. Rhythmbox looks like a nice replacement for xmms, it can also rip (though it once crashed on me)

the bad

1. the top bar (menu panel) has disappeared... really annoying. is that a gnome 2.4 feature?
   cheap solution: add a normal panel, make it thin, add the "Menu Bar" from "Add to Panel", and also "Window Menu". it's not a menu panel, but it will look like one. See also whatsnew in 2.4
2. no mp3 support (rh9 already had this problem, solution: gurulabs.com still works, but you need "rpm --nodeps"). See also livna.org for a yum based approach.
3. changing timezones using clock 2.4.0 works, but forget the timezone itself. rh9 does this ok. there is still the bug that all new shells are ok, but the clock itself won't change!! You have to restart X for this to work fine. I believe cron is also confused about time when you change timezones. They all inherit it from a parent that hasn't changed. This was filed as
4. ieck: moving objects from the panel into a drawer, makes them completely loose their identity.... they've become cute icons and nothing more. no more action.
5. the xkill application, but also the 'Force Quit' button you can add to menus surely used to kill only the window i would press on, but now it kills them all... notably killing one gnome-terminal will kill them all. xterms are safe from this. multi-threading is the culprit.
6. hmm. does redhat modify mozilla. the download area from rightclicks keep being reset to my homedirectory. i want it in /tmp, keep doing it, but when restarting mozilla, i keep getting my home directory
7. if you use auto-raise, switching a desktop won't auto-raise the window if you happen to land on one that was below. this was working fine in rh9/gnome2.2

the ugly

1. huh, no more pine? (mutt is still supported)

no mplayer? 
no xine?      - see http://rpm.livna.org/  for a list of removed and why

URLs to visit:
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/mega-merge.php
Atrpms 
Dagrpms 
Newrpms 
Freshrpms

some other i8200 user:  www.isrec.isb-sib.ch/~agrosdid/fedora_dell.html