[Mageia-discuss] Alpha 3 snapshot

Tue Feb 14 09:27:59 CET 2012

Following the good advice from Morgan (network install) I have now been 
+able to make a clean install with all the latest updates and to go 
+through all the steps I normally do to customize and verify my 
+production system. A couple of interesting points, here is the lot:
+
+1. After this minimum install, I habe been unable to create media of 
+type file (urpmi.addmedia): although urpmi had been correctly installed, 
+genhdlist2 was missing - I guess a dependency of urpmi on genhdlist2 is 
+missing.
+
+2. Korganizer installs and runs well, but importing an existing .vcs 
+calendar does not work: Korganizer finds the file with the existing 
+calendar, but then creates an empty new calendar of that name - does not 
+import the contents of the existing calendar
+
+3. I was positively surprised: printer installation - often a problem 
+with new releases - went quite well. Printer detection (hp laserjet MP 6 
+on the parallel port and networked hp deskjet 6127) without any problem. 
+However (for both), finding the driver was a funny business: took far 
+too much time, and iterated between "searching for driver", short flash 
+of some other window, and again "searching for driver", but with some 
+patience the result turned out OK.
+
+4. Another positive surprise: both lighttpd and backuppc services got 
+started as they should, no problem with systemd (except see 5)
+
+5. Service control with drkconf.real -> System -> Manage system services 
+practically does not work. Start and Stop do not seem to have much 
+effect (and no feedback on the running/stopped indication); but the "On 
+boot" button seems to do what it is supposed to do). But the whole thing 
+appears to be shaky, it happened ( once, I did not make an effort to 
+reproduce the problem) that the services window came up with all "On 
+boot" buttons unchecked - correct display after a re-boot. The service 
+control facility of drakconf.real certainly still needs some debugging. 
+I dont know whether the command-line alternative (/etc/inet.d/<service> 
+<action> is still supposed to work under systemd, for the services I 
+dealt with it does not.
+
+6. Several packages which use Gtk (started from a console) display an 
+error message when they start: "ldconfig: /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 is not 
+a symbolic link"
+
+7. The geda packages which I am maintaining (and which worked under 
+Alpha 1 now throw - mostly Gtk and oxygen related - errors, I will have 
+to re-dig and rebuild these packages). That may be a warning to other 
+package maintainers who did their homework early: packages built under 
+Alpha1 dont necessarily work any more.
+
+8. Sometime soon after boot, there is practically alway a notification 
+popup saying "Error while initializing DBus, Disabling the service"
+
+9. System Shutdown is going from bad to worse - earlier, it most times 
+just got stuck - now after some initial screen waggling, the desktop 
+activates again. I have ended up to do "reboot" from Konsole.
+
+10. The random console switching problem is still there, but the 
+workaround suggested is OK.
+
+11. KDE
+- the taskbar now has a vertically graded background - very light gray 
+at its top, rather dark gray at its bottom - apparenly not configurable; 
+the dark gray at the bottom results in far too little contrast with dark 
+fonts and makes the lower part of the taskbar difficult to read, with 
+light fonts the opposite - nice look, but user-unfriendly.
+
+- the titlebar (Oxygen) still has no colour, distinguishing the active 
+window from inactive windows is still difficult
+
+- creating popup menu buttons in the taskbar still does not work - a 
+show stopper for me.
+
+This using Alpha 3 in-spite of all took so much time that I now have to 
+catch up with other stuff that got left behind - no time left for 
+distilling these issues into bug reports. But I hope that this snapshot 
+helps; and I will, as Marja suggested, make comments in the already 
+existing bugzilla reports to clarify that the bugs are still open and, 
+where adequate, insist on their importance.
+