[5279] in testers
Alpha begins, for Linux
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Apr 9 17:39:44 2003
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 17:39:42 -0400
Message-Id: <200304092139.RAA10042@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
The 9.2 alpha test will begin for Linux with the next Hesiod
propagation. Solaris will probably begin this evening after one more
bug is fixed; I'll send more mail when that happens.
The usual caveat applies: the alpha release may destroy your machine
and corrupt your soul. But it's your responsibility to test it
anyway.
My impression of this release is that it's fairly solid on the OS side
and built out of wet cardboard on the UI side. Here is my scary list
of known bugs, the vast majority of which only affect the GNOME stuff.
* There's no pref conversion from GNOME 1 yet.
* The 9.1 menus will need a lot of updating for 9.2. It is known
that they are unsorted and often run the wrong thing (e.g. gnomecc
instead of gnome-control-center).
* On Solaris, gnome-terminal sometimes takes unacceptably long to
deal with being unobscured. It's also pretty miserable at
handling scrolling text. We may need to do something drastic like
fall back to the GNOME 1.4 terminal until we have an
XRender-capable Solaris X server. (Though there may be less
drastic solutions, such as fixing inefficiencies in the
non-XRender Xft code or using a native X font.)
* xscreensaver is still installed only as xss. I don't really know
what this breaks.
* gnome-terminal comes up with the wrong geometry and, arguably,
with a font that's too large. Maybe we want to live with the
default font being too large to fit two terminal windows side by
side, especially with the tab support in the new gnome-terminal.
but we definitely need to fix the size of the window one way or
another.
* Fonts don't look as good on Solaris as they do on Linux. We may
need to install better fonts under Solaris to make things look
nice, or perhaps just tell fontconfig how to find some nice Type 1
fonts hiding in the Solaris OS distribution. (As far as I can
tell, the default font for gnome-terminal on Linux comes from
XFree86 4.3, even though the vte RPM depends on the bitmap-fonts
RPM which contains a different set of fonts. That's confusing.)
* It appears GNOME 2 has replaced xalf with something called
startup-notification, which works under a different principle. I
have not yet figured out how to turn on startup-notification or
what it does when you run an old a.out binary.
* On Linux, I have seen rpm hang at startup. To recover, you have
to blow away /var/lib/rpm/__db*. Red Hat has one or two bugzilla
reports about this. So far I haven't seen it affecting our
update process, but it may turn into a problem requiring a
workaround.
* dm seems to hang on Linux whenever it tries to write to stderr.
That shouldn't cause a problem most of the time, but it means any
kind of failure will result in bizarre and unhelpful behavior.
* The Solaris update reboots for configuration changes partway
through. That doesn't hurt anything, but it takes extra time and
indicates a minor bug.
* The update may break some X configurations because we suck. My
Thinkpad A22p was configured (under 9.1) with a 1280x1024 mode in
XF86Config, but it doesn't operate at that resolution. Under 9.1
the server just came up at 1600x1200 anyway; under 9.2 the server
refused to start.
