July 2, 2007 — I finally decided to do a review of Fedora 7. I think by now everyone is already aware of the fatal issue with the ATI driver fglrx and Fedora 7. I posted about the issue on the Fedora Forum. I have been also following the animated discussion on Phoronix for quite a while now. When the first test version of F7 came on the scene, I tested the scripts that Michael Larabel developed to adapt the fglrx script to the F7 test 1. You can read all about it here.
I am still waiting for the fix from ATI to the issue with fglrx and Fedora 7. In the meantime, as pointed out by leigh123 on Fedora Forum and others, I wanted to see whether the solution that we had accomplished for Test 1 was indeed still valid. Test 2 was the last version I remember where fglrx worked with Fedora 7. I should really point out the issues was different for test 4 where due to the new Xorg numbering scheme, the driver segfaulted. Currently the issue is "deep inside the proprietary blob" of fglrx. There was a lot of speculation that the issue would be resolved with the latest incarnation of the driver,
I downloaded the F7 DVD and proceeded to install it on my spare disk. As usual, I am still dealing with the 64bit version of Fedora 7. There have been remarkably few changes to Anaconda. About the only change from prior versions of Fedora is that all disks are now considered sda etc. as opposed to hda etc. This should not matter much unless you are mounting disks in fstab by device name. In this case, you will have to modify them to reflect this new naming convention. The other is an application called smolt that collects hardware information and wants to submit to the developers of Fedora. Considering the hue and cry whenever Microsoft wants to do this, I am not sure if this a good idea. It does nag you if you decide not to submit your hardware profile.
I did not submit my profile since I did not have a network connection when I was installing F7 anyway. I am usually not near my Access point to have a wired connection and bcm43xx has never worked to my satisfaction as I have stated before. During the installation process, I chose to customize and opposed to customize later and deselected all the i386 software that was preselected. However, the installer never honors this request. While I understand the whole issue with multlib and the desire for some people to have i386 versions of software to "just work", I fail to understand why some applications need to be installed twice, for example, rhythmbox, firefox etc.
Any, I saw that the customization selected 1304 packages and after formatting the
It went through the process of rebooting. It did correctly select my widescreen monitor (1680x1050) and proceeded through the setup. I was shown the GPL, though now you simply continue with the setup. You set up the firewall and then I disabled SeLinux which usually warned me of dire consequences. Anyway, all the screens are self explanatory and there are no surprises other than the hard profile business we already talked. After the sound detection, F7 was ready to reboot. I must say, we have come a long way from the days when you had to wrestle with these mundane stuff. I am glad we have made a lot of progress here. See the tour of F7 at the Fedora project Wiki.
One nice thing about Fedora 7 is laptop features on the computer are very nicely supported. When you are on battery power, the screen automatically dims down to conserve enery. Another nice feature is that the suspend works out-of-the-box. There is absolutely no configuration to worry about. If you close the lid when you are on battery, the computer immediately goes into suspension. This mimics the behavior you may be accustomed to in the Windows world. This is a nice feature. However, one annoying thing about this arrangement is that your wireless does not wake up when you come out of suspension by open the lid again. There is an easy fix to this namely you need to re-associate the essid to your wireless access port (AP)
iwconfig wlan0 essid your-AP-essid
That should get your wireless going again. If anyone has a solution to this, please let me know.
During the reboot process, I selected to boot as a single user,
Now it was time to take a look at the ATI proprietary drivers fglrx as we continue on the next page.
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