Fedora 13: One day I love you, the next day you're dead to mepushing kernel updates that break my system ... but I'm holding on for the moment

For a few weeks now I've been using gthumb 2.12 from experimental. Debian of course. The older version from sid and upward had a bug when batch resizing. This one works great and it's very important to me because I use it for work every day.
If you want stability, I do find Debian and/or its so-called true derivatives to be the way to go. Now with backports becoming official it can be kept a rock solid and very up to date system for a long time.

I have had the same problem with Fedora 12 after a kernel update. You are not alone. I am stuck with the original kernel and nothing that I do seems to get around that.

The only thing that I can attribute it to is trying to get the proprietary Nvidia driver to work. I got it working, but had to edit grub as part of that process. But after the kernel upgrade I could not boot into the newer kernel and the grub edit does not seem to help.

So, Fedora 12 works, sort of. :) I installed Fedora 13, but did not like it as well. I will try Fedora 14. For some reason the even numbered releases seem to work better for me.

So wait -- these problems happen because you have alternate drivers installed, and you blame Fedora for it? Why not ask the driver vendors to fix their out of tree drivers? I have a Radeon HD 4850 here that works great with F13 since release day. Every few months Fedora runs a public test week where you can download an image and report problems so the release will have the best X drivers possible. Did you know about it, and if so, did you take advantage of it?

And as for being "tired," what about the free software developers who bust their humps constantly to give you an entire operating system to run without cost? Are you really unable to give that little bit back to help them help you? (Assuming that there's some problem beyond the broken proprietary fglrx driver and any other out of tree stuff you're running.) And no, writing "helpful" blogs about your bugs does not count as helping. The cost of free software isn't zero, it's supported by all the people who pitch in a little time to make a better world for everyone around them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to flame you here. I totally understand your frustration, but what you're doing is akin to shooting yourself in the foot, blaming Nike for the injury, and telling everyone they should wear clogs instead. You're simply setting yourself up to have similar problems on whatever distro you go to. I've been on Ubuntu long enough to know that they have just as many, and usually more, problems than Fedora in this area.

You'll get best results by actually joining public test processes before the release, or at least by politely filing a bug to help make things better. Come join the folks who are working for a better tomorrow, it's really fulfilling and fun, and you get to meet some of the smartest people, and even understand your system a lot better if you care to.

I'm not blaming Fedora for anything. If the problems I've been having with most Linux system over the past couple of months were Fedora-specific, they would have been fixed long ago. If they affected more users than me, ditto.

The fact that the open-source ATI driver pretty much ceased working in the kernel-mode-setting era, even with KMS turned off, in Fedora, Ubuntu, Salix and even FreeBSD is a sign that the direction in which Xorg is going (and has been going) may be giving some users additional functionality but is doing that by robbing other users of basic funcitonality (i.e. their display actually working.

This happened to me on my 10-year-old Intel i810 video hardware, and after everybody telling me that nobody cares about hardware that old I go out and get brand-new hardware (ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD) and start having problems all over again. I'm not asking for 3D. I just want a clear, working 2D display.

Yes, I missed the last Fedora test day for Radeon, and when it comes along again, I would very much like to be a part of it. The community spirit in Fedora, in both words and deeds, is something I applaud. For a project with such a close connection to a commercial entity (Red Hat) to be so open, both in terms of software licenses as well as governance and participation, it really shows the rest of the software world how well such a thing can be done. Given the open nature of Fedora, I know I'm not the only user or community member who thinks the update policy over the course of Fedora releases has its problems. Offering a newer kernel mid-release is great, but pushing everybody from one kernel version to another, as Fedora did with 2.6.33 to 2.6.34 in F13, did cause problems for me.

I went outside the distro for the alsa-driver package because it was the only thing that made it possible for me to mute my speakers and do audio production without annoying the people sitting next to me (who are plenty annoyed already at the rest of my antics). Ironically, I couldn't make the sound function "correctly" without 2.6.34, but the video troubles that kernel brought have dampened my enthusiasm for such mid-cycle updating.

While I can say that I have a lot to say about Fedora in a positive light, it's an open question in my very own mind: Was running Fedora worth it? Could I have suffered through fewer problems had I gone with another distribution?

The bleeding-edge nature of Fedora cuts both ways. I could easily get the latest gThumb build through Koji and use a package that was both within the distribution and updated thereafter with Yum. I had no idea that the same bleeding edge also applied to kernels. I really have to question the move from 2.6.33 to 2.6.34 in the middle of the release. Before I added a single package outside of Fedora and RPM Fusion, the move from 2.6.33 to 2.6.34 killed my video. Had I been able to stay within RPM Fusion, I'd probably be OK with fglrx in the newest kernel. But kmod-catalyst in RPM Fusion hasn't been updated since the 2.6.34.6 kernel, and Fedora has been on 2.6.34.7 for quite some time.

I understand that RPM Fusion, like Fedora, is a free service, and is not beholden to me in the slightest. But its developers have been able to continually update kmod-nvidia, which has tracked the Fedora 13 kernels very well. Why not the same for kmod-catalyst?

I did file a bug against xserver-xorg-drv-ati with Fedora, but I'm pretty sure the problem is upstream with Xorg.

If I didn't say I'm tired of trying to get hardware to continually work mid-cycle, I'd be omitting the truth. The sound problem will be solved when distros use "pure" ALSA 1.0.23 without pieces of 1.0.21 or 1.0.22 lurking as they do in F13 (in the kernel, I suspect; hence my need for the alsa-driver package that doesn't exist in Fedora).

I do understand that part of the Fedora thing is experiencing bugs and working through them. I just wish I was one of the lucky few who experience no problems during the release and maybe can even run the next release without having to troubleshoot sound and video issues.

All of that said, I've enjoyed running Fedora and have appreciated all that goes into the project. I looked back into my archives and it looks like I began using Fedora 13 in July. So it's about 3 1/2 months pretty much full-time. My hardware is so new that I thought Fedora would handle it better than other distributions.

Making the choice to fix sound but break video with the move to 2.6.34 was difficult, but if I stick with 2.6.34.7-56 and my ATI "hotfix" video, I should be OK for the rest of this cycle.

If I could somehow figure out how to make the open-source ati driver work, all of my problems would be solved. Even if you don't care about closed-source software from a philosophical standpoint, from a usability standpoint open source clearly wins when it comes to transparency, troubleshooting and release frequency.

After three years of using Linux and BSD operating systems, I'm slowly growing more pessimistic about Linux making it into the desktop mainstream. There's a reason why the "base" of Windows and Mac OS stays the same for years while the applications around them get more frequent updates. There's a reason why RHEL releases stick around for so long (although the extreme lack of updated desktop apps for RHEL, even with EPEL and things like the Dag Wieers repo, makes RHEL somewhat of a nonstarter for me).

While the breakneck-speed cycle of Linux is seemingly good for new hardware, it seems that the constantly moving target of a given Linux distribution tends to break too many things in the name of adding others.

There are so many good things about Fedora for the "power user." The ability to add different versions of applications built within the distribution without adding repositories is something I really like. Yum is an excellent tool. I love the Fedora Spins portion of the project (and am running Xfce after trying and also liking LXDE; I'd love a multimedia-production spin of Fedora).

This has been a learning experience. I'm just trying to put all of this out there so people can see what one person goes through over the course of using a release. I'd like to think it's a valuable contribution (even though non-developers are treated like lepers to many in open source).

Yes, I will resume filing bugs, and I'd like nothing more than to improve sound and video in general for open-source users. But nothing kills me more than having something work only to have it stop working due to adding of features for other hardware. As I wrote many times during my Intel i810 problems, the Xorg/Unix/Linux world did numerous users a great disservice by adding kernel mode setting to the whole of a given driver. If the user base had been split, say between "Intel without KMS" and "Intel with KMS," things would be better for both groups, I believe. The "old" drivers then, as now with ATI, worked fine, and packing too many kinds of hardware into a single driver framework has wreaked considerable havoc on my systems.

It's nice to hear people say, "I've been running (insert distro name here) since the release and have had no trouble whatsoever." But that's not everybody.

In closing, I love Fedora. This has been a positive experience overall. A 2.6.33 kernel with up-to-date security patches and a 1.0.23 ALSA driver would have been enough to keep me extremely happy with Fedora and shouting said happiness from the rooftops.

Don't the kernel and Xorg developers realize what they're doing to scores of users and how they're killing adoption of X-based OSes with their implementation of kernel mode setting? That, my friends and enemies, isn't a Fedora problem. It's not a distro problem. It's an upstream problem. I wish I knew enough to help solve it.

All I want to say to developers is, "Regressions hurt Linux."

The entire post contains some good observations, but you missed one point: If you are doing actual work on a given machine, you don't experiment on it, period, end of story.

I, too, have had good luck with Debian Lenny, Ubuntu 8.04 and 10.04, along with Linux Mint 9. They all have two things in common. They work on the hardware they are on, and they are long term releases.

I, too, made the mistake of upgrading one computer to Squeeze too early (and with a KDE based system that was especially bad). The result was a system that got switched to LXDE, and which will stay there when Squeeze goes final.

Assuming Squeeze will be released early next year, that means over a year of support for Lenny left. I will be in no hurry to update my other machines.

Mileage varies with hardware on linux, period. Having gone to some mysterious who know wtf repos to add functionality (I can only assume something invasive) what did you expect? Do that to any distro, do that to windows(ie: turn on sloppy mouse focus in the registry) and your risk fubaring your system. I have Fedora 13 running on 7 systems between home and work, 3 laptops, 2 desktops and 2 servers. I also use it at work with numerous users over NX for linux desktops inside ESX Vmware. Ive seen some oddities on my netbook with the battery monitor. Thats it. Of course I ONLY use fedora repos, rpmfusion and (when they had it) adobe flash. I also have no ATI cards. The flglx driver... well that could be the source of 90% of your issues. Fact is this will and does happen on other distros, I have Ubuntu 10.10 no more than 3 feet from me on a laptop running a basic driver and suspend etc have never worked. Its Linux, as you said, not fedora. But perhaps more importantly if you plan to hack up your system plan on hacking it back together. Thats the nature of the beast. You have the power you just better know how to use it and if you dont... welp. PS, I ran Net/FreeBSD for a good 6 years more than a decade ago and off and on here and there. Sorry, BSD cant touch the linux desktop. Its just the sad truth. On a leaving note also remember... Fedora is experimental. Additionally, anything production and critical should have a method of upgrade without interruption. If its disruptive you have only yourself to blame (UNIX admin of 20 years talking).

This is the first time I've ever gone outside a distribution for anything. Having the open-source video driver fail in mid-release and the proprietary driver from RPM Fusion work exceedingly poorly was what drove me to install the driver from ATI's site.

I had the video problems BEFORE I went outside the distribution. It wasn't "experimentation" to make things perform better but trying to find a working driver.

Yeah, getting my speakers to properly mute is a factor, and adding the alsa-driver package is definitely "experimenting," but more than my "experimenting" with an outside video driver, Fedora experimented plenty by changing kernel version in the middle of a release.

The fact that the developers of the Linux kernel and Xorg have been experimenting with kernel mode setting, and that "improvement" has twice left me without working video (Intel i810 and now ati) is not at all insignificant.

Despite all of this, Fedora right now is working very well. I'm fairly optimistic about F14.

I probably will be moving this laptop to Fedora 14 at some point in the cycle.

I don't know if I will try an in-place upgrade or a full reinstall.

My knowledge of Yum and how the various Fedora and RPM Fusion repositories are configured is a bit weak, but this might be a good time to learn about it.

Before I do the upgrade, I'll do the following:

• Remove fglrx driver, delete xorg.conf, reinstall open-source ati driver. (I installed fglrx from ATI/AMD's package (here's the page with the latest version of the Catalyst driver direct from AMD) my video is horribly blurry and snowy with the open-source ati/radeon driver, but it's usable enough to boot up and get the fglrx driver after the upgrade.

• Remove alsa-driver (which I got here from ATrpms). I probably won't need this in Fedora 14, which is ALSA 1.0.23 all the way and allows for creation (in Fedora) and modification of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf so the speakers will mute when headphones are plugged in.
• I don't know if I'll remove Chromium and the repo from which I got it. I really don't use it, so I could dump it and feel no pain. I pretty much stick with Firefox since it performs so well on this newish hardware.
• Will I have to do anything to my RPMFusion repo configuration? Will those packages update along with the rest of Fedora? I'll have to look into that.
• I always have full backups of my user files (made with rsync, my backup utility of choice in Linux, BSD and Mac OS X). I could go a step further and image the entire drive with Clonezilla, but if this doesn't work, I'll do a full reinstall of Fedora 14, Ubuntu 10.10 or (looking less likely due to older ALSA) Debian Squeeze.
• Fedora 13 will continue to receive support until a month after Fedora 15's release (not that I need or want any updates at this point; new kernels bring new problems at this point), so I have 7 months+ to ponder all of this, not that I'll wait that long (though I just might).