Well the move was a big risk. We have here one RedHat fan who sparked
Hell while RH 7 was being readied. So personally it was a big surprise
to see 2.96 on cooker...
Anyway I compiled and started rebuilding every package I need. There are
some serious problems but the ratio fails/successes proves that 2.96
came to stay. My congratulations to the madman who did this move...
I should note that graphics, games and several other multimedia stuff
are working generally faster and more stable. There only problem was
that I had to turn sound back to Alsa. OSS drivers went completely crazy
on the GUS MAX (it outputs pure noise). In the rest my kernel is working
perfectly with the TV tuner, network and my highly overclocked dual-SMP
motherboard. OpenGL stuff has shown higher rates of ~5 fps more than
before. Not too much but some slowdowns have gone :)
Only one critical factor may shadow the turn to 2.96. Netscape is dead.
Seriously dead. This mostly concerns mail & news. For some time I've
been noting more and more crashes while reading mail or news. Right now
things have gone so bad that, even by having the mailer on foreground,
the thing may freeze the whole machine. Btw a similar situation has been
seen on other machines here, but less frequently. So I had to turn to
other systems like mozilla. Meanwhile no other programs have shown such
behaviour. Nearly 95% of the latest machine freezes are due to Netscape
(~5% due to my personal RAM leaks) It seems it is time to say R.I.P.
Netscape 4...
Ektanoor
