Preupgrade kills Fedora 13-to-14 system; starting over with fresh Fedora 13 install

Preupgrade didn't work.

My Fedora 13 Xfce laptop with the fglrx/catalyst video driver wouldn't start X or give any usable video with the open ati driver, the closed fglrx driver, or the vesa driver after using preupgrade to bring it up to Fedora 14.

The machine segfaults every time I try to run X.

Before I started the preupgrade, I updated my /home backup. And after I couldn't get it the newly upgraded system to run X at all (and could barely get a console unless I messed with the boot line on a couple of the three kernels I had available), I used the Fedora 13 DVD to install a new system. This time I opted for the standard GNOME version of Fedora.

And now I'm in the comfortable 2.6.33 kernel that provides the perfect video for my ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD chip that I so enjoyed in the days before kernel-mode setting in 2.6.34 made the Linux portion of my life miserable.

This xorg-x11-drv-ati driver under 2.6.33 performs so much better than AMD/ATI's fglrx/catalyst driver under 2.6.34, the loss of that speed and functionality not just in Fedora but in all distros that use KMS for ATI doesn't just border on but crosses fully into the realm of tragic.

Right now I'm running a flawless yet woefully unpatched Fedora 13 system that will lose its video capability with the 542 updates I'll be doing tomorrow when I get hooked up to a fast connection. Barring a pre-Christmas miracle, I'll be running Debian Squeeze (or "other") within the next couple of days. If only this open-source ati-driver goodness could continue. In Debian — where even Sid runs 2.6.32 at present — it can.

Let me restate the obvious: The video with the open ati driver is great. It's fast, clear, with no problems at all.

I haven't dropped my /home files in yet. Nor have I hooked up RPM Fusion, Adobe's Linux repo, or the dreaded ATI/AMD Catalyst driver. At least Debian Squeeze allows me to avoid the indignity of kernel mode setting and proprietary drivers. (And if you must use proprietary graphics drivers, Ubuntu allows for them to be updated by the distribution's package-management system.) While I've had less than stellar luck with Slackware-derived Salix and ZenWalk, it would appear that Slackware 13.1 is a potential candidate for "no KMS polluting the kernel" status.

Remembering how great Fedora 13 was at the beginning, with those cool boot-up and shutdown screens (and actual working video), all of which went away with KMS in the 2.6.34 kernel, it's beyond maddening at how the distro itself (and by extension Linux in general, given the "everybody uses the same kernels" nature of this particular beast) broke mid-release. Even if the fglrx driver represented a terrific performance improvement (which in my experience it does not), losing the ability to have the driver work with more than one kernel (i.e. after an update) and having to reinstall again and again — that's not my idea of what Linux is about.

Having kmod-catalyst suddenly stop receiving updates midway through the Fedora 13 cycle, with no kmod-catalyst at all for Fedora 14 shows the level of disconnect out there.

I'll repeat this in a standalone entry, but since I repeat myself ... repeatedly, I'll start it here:

To adopt kernel mode setting for video drivers in order to add functionality to some users while basically removing the ability of the driver to work at all — i.e. ALL functionality for others is not the kind of tradeoff that Linux and Xorg should be making.

In both the Intel and ATI situations, the "old" drivers without KMS should have been maintained, and new drivers utilizing KMS should have been created for those systems that can handle it.

Habitual readers of this blog might wonder why I continually (and continually) complain about the same things. Over and over.

I needed the fglrx driver in Ubuntu 10.10, where it worked well. I don't need it in Debian, and probably never will throughout the Squeeze cycle. If I can figure out Backports and apt-pinning, I should be able to spend a good long time in Debian. Will that be enough time for the open-source world to clean up this mess? Things have finally gotten a bit tolerable for Intel video users whose hardware doesn't do KMS. Maybe the same restoration of sanity will creep into the ati/radeon codebase.

Ah, Fedora. It's been an interesting ride. I liked the easy access to all those new packages. You look terrific, especially in Xfce where I've never seen a better design. While RPM Fusion is at best a minor inconvenience, at worst a hole-filled repository, you did all the multimedia playback and recording I needed you to do.

Tomorrow morning, 542 updated packages later, I'll know how things stand.