[Mageia-dev] Feedback on Mageia 3 beta1

Thu Jan 17 00:10:35 CET 2013

Dear Mageia packagers,
+
+Now that it's time for polishing, I'd like to give a feedback on my own
+experience with mga3 beta1.
+
+I've installed a mga3 beta1 x86_64 (DVD GNOME install) as soon as it has
+been released on a brand new SSD (one of my two 6 year old 320MB old
+disks mounted as a striped LVM was agonizing and corrupting my
+filesystems...). Here's a (not so) quick review of my installation.
+As I wanted something modern, simple and performant, I decided to give a
+try to btrfs as my root partition without separated /boot (hence why I
+was a waiting beta1 for GRUB2) nor /var and, of course these days, no
+/usr neither. My /home remains in ext4, as I'm aware of the btrfs' fsck
+not considered as something reliable enough...
+
+First of all, I've noticed that when you choose a customized size for a
+partition, each time you edit the size (resize button) of a partition
+and then cancel without any change, the size is decremented by a couple
+of MB. Not a blocking bug though, but it should be fixed, IMHO.
+I've also noticed that the installer hasn't automatically proposed GRUB2
+as the default bootloader, whereas my root partition wasn't accessible
+from GRUB legacy and I had no independent ext3 /boot. Of course, this
+shouldn't be a problem if GRUB2 becomes the default bootloader for the
+final mga3...
+The rest of the installation went seamlessly and brought me to GDM.
+
+However, after the installation there were some "anomalies":
+
+- my kernel was the server version one (kernel-server), even though I
+haven't selected any server configuration ;
+
+- more annoying, there was no syslog daemon and I had to install rsyslog
+by myself. It seems that none of the core packages is requiring a syslog
+daemon (unless systemd is supposed to handle the syslog in a way I'm not
+aware of);
+
+- I was unable to mount a CD/DVD as a normal user, but only as root. A
+really annoying bug (#8405) for end users IMHO, but I finally found a
+simple stupid solution: get rid of the cdrom entry generated in the
+fstab and let the magic udev/udisks do the trick! This cdrom entry
+should probably not be generated by the installer anymore...
+
+- I own a DVB card, but its firmware (dvb-fe-tda10046.fw) is not
+provided by any mga package. We used to find it in a Mandriva PLF rpm
+before. It would be nice for end users to find it in a Mageia package
+somehow. Moreover, the module and its dependencies (saa7134,
+saa7134_dvb, saa7134_alsa) don't work after resuming from suspend.
+Unfortunately, a dedicated script in /etc/pm/sleep.d/ doesn't help since
+it doesn't seem to be called. But anyway, this bug should have been
+fixed for a long time as a patch has been proposed to the kernel
+subsystem maintainer (Mauro Carvalho Chehab), but... see the most
+interesting part of the story here:
+http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.video-input-infrastructure/46854
+Perhaps Thomas, our dear kernel master, could include it in the next mga
+kernel, so I could give my feedback on the patch?...
+
+- Another very annoying thing too is that some packages (easytag, and
+also thunar when installing XFCE although you choose nautilus as your
+favorite filemanager) are replacing Nautilus for handling folders and
+mounted removable drives (SDcard, USB key...). The fix is to remove
+these "inode/directory" entries of the desktop files in
+/usr/share/applications/ and also from
+/usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache (or at least put nautilus.desktop
+as the first one in mimeinfo.cache) ;
+
+- Still no easy way to convert my Bluetooth DiNovo keyboard & mouse
+combo into a generic purpose Bluetooth receiver (the usual fix doesn't
+work at all: neither hiddev* nor hidraw* in
+/lib/udev/rules.d/97-bluetooth-hid2hci.rules is working anymore)...
+
+- Default GTK+ configuration seems to be "non standard" (gtk-theme-name
+is set to oxygen-gtk and gtk-icon-theme-name is set to oxygen-gtk both
+in /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc/ and /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini instead of
+respectively "Adwaita" and "gnome") causing some glitches (for example,
+when you change the volume with mutimedia keys, the OSD sound volume
+background image is missing and replaced by an ugly gray) ;
+
+- grub2 + early plymouth experience remains not very good, we are still
+far from a flicker free boot. Resolutions are limited to 4:3 ratios and
+up to 1600×1200 (my display is a 16:10 1920×1200 driven by a free r300g
+KMS driver), but I guess this kind of things belongs to upstream. For
+instance, although grub2 is configured as graphical and quiet, I'm still
+seeing some text mode screens during the boot. Isn't plymouth supposed
+to avoid it?
+
+- mediatomb has to be patched in order to work with the recent Samsung
+SmartTV models (2012 "E" series like the UE46E7000). I've rebuilt our
+latest package applying the patch (found here:
+http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3532724&group_id=129766&atid=715782)
+and, after some tweakings in the config file (custom_header and changes
+for mkv mime-type) and the firewall rules, it now plays successfully
+everything I tested.
+
+- GDM dialogs (or pam ones) are still not localized (passord, login
+errors...), but I guess it's normal for a beta1...
+
+Last thing, I think it would be smart to install or suggest, some
+packages that could be considered essential to any kind of installation
+(at least those connected to a network, i.e. 99.9%). For instance:
+- bash-completion;
+- ntp;
+- ssh.
+
+Please, let me know which of the reported problems deserve some bugzilla
+entries. And I apologize if you think my post is too long or irrelevant
+for this mailing list.
+
+HTH,
+
+Davy
+
+