Prosthetic Conscience

Fedora 12 upgrade

So, I upgraded from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12 over Thanksgiving weekend. I had skipped the Fedora 11 upgrade because of a bug in either preupgrade or the F11 install images used by preupgrade. By the time I got a round tuit to try upgrading to F11 again, F12 was a week from being out, so I just waited, then used the F12 preupgrade. It went very quickly, and fairly smoothly. These are the problems the upgrade caused me, sorted into fixed and not-yet-fixed.

Problems fixed:

• Had to reinstall lots of python libraries (had been built for 2.5, needed in 2.6) in order to get my websites to work. This was expected, though more packages were affected than I had expected.
• I had quite a few problems merging my old dovecot and postfix config files with the new ones, which resulted in the household not getting any mail for a few days. This was mostly my fault, though.
• Any sound played through pulseaudio was accompanied by a horrifying hissing noise except when the volume was at a single specific value. This turned out to be a problem with my sound device’s ALSA driver and the “glitch-free” playback in pulseaudio. This is despite the fact that I have snd_via82xx, which is supposed to work. Changing pulseaudio’s settings to add ‘tsched=0’ to anything that might load a hardware module solved it, but not until after a reboot. Probably an old pulseaudio process was hanging around from one or another user and keeping the old settings active.
• Gnome menus have old legacy things in them that they’re not supposed to. I have to fix this with every dist-upgrade.

Not fixed yet

• Old VMWare doesn’t work with the new kernel. On the laptop, which runs Ubuntu, I’d already run into this and upgraded VMWare to solve it. I’ll have to do this here in the next week or so.
• Some of my policy settings (like letting sound continue playing when you switch users) have been lost, and since there is no longer any admin GUI for PolicyKit, there’s no obvious way to fix this. I find this annoying, because my audio is played by mpd, the whole point of which is to play music when run as someone other than the active logged-in user. Adding some group memberships may fix it… have to see after restarting some services.

Conclusions

Fedora 12 seems nicely put together, and the upgrade was, though not the smoothest, smoother than many others I’ve gone through in the past.

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