Hi all,
I installed LM 8.0 on two boxes and have had numerous problems. I think
Mandrakesoft should acknowledge them and offer an help page to its users
(this should be done for every release: there will *always* be problems
that pop up just *after* the official release, when you think everything
is alright ...). Here we go anyway:
---- System n. 1 (AMD K6 350MHz, Savage3d, 64 Mb RAM) ----
This is my test system, installation went smoothly, but:
- once I had a "kernel panic" when shutting down the system;
- the support for my graphics card (Savage 3D) is much worse than with X
3.3.6: moving the mouse pointer on the screen causes several glitches
(white lines, artifacts); this is not Traktopel's fault, probably,
unless you consider problems in compiling X that surfaced as concerns
the font system.
The other problems I met are the same I describe below.
---- System n. 2 (Celeron 400MHz, Matrox G200, 128 Mb RAM) ----
This is my "work" system, and I confess that I had a slight bad feeling
installing LM 8.0 after what I saw on my test system. Installation was
fine, again, and I experienced no kernel panics (so far). Instead, I
still have to face many small problems:
- an empty .mozilla was created in / : weird;
- fonts: thanks to some tips I found on MUO, I adjusted fonts in KDE but
still have weird fonts in Netscape and elsewhere, in particular a really
ugly helvetica font: how can I tell netscape not to use that font? I
understand it's a problem related to Type1 rendering, will there be an
update to the relevant packages?
- supermount: this otherwise nice and useful program sometimes gets
horribly confused when mounting/unmounting my CDs, to the point that
once the whole system was freezed and all I could do was press the reset
button ... This most definitely shouldn't happen.
- sawfish: when switching from one workspace to another one, the window
bars and frames take about half a second to be redrawn: this is weird,
never happened before with all the versions of sawfish I tried (and I
tried almost all); while not strictly being (probably) a LM 8.0 problem
I'd like to know if other people experienced the same behaviour and have
a fix for it. (Another problem with sawfish: left Window key is not
recognized, it worked perfectly under 7.2)
- gdm: I can't have gdm as the login manager, I created a "desktop" file
containing the string "GNOME" in /etc/sysconfig, like I did under LM
7.2, but nothing happens: am I doing something stupid or what?
- exiting from GNOME, on the other hand, after I click on the panel
button (or choose the menu item) I always have to wait about 10-15
seconds before the session is closed: why?!? Didn't have to wait that
long under LM 7.2.
- imwheel: didn't work well in LM 7.2, seems even worse in 8.0 as the
@Exclude option doesn't work anymore (at least here); the configuration
file is the same as for LM 7.2, so it seems it didn't receive a lot of
attention ... Anybody else experiencing problems? Any ideas why the
@Exclude option doesn't work anymore?
- ip masquerading: the script I used under 7.2 doesn't work anymore, so
I used drakgw, which installed the relevant packages. It didn't work,
anyway, and I disabled it, but I still get warning messages at boot
about a missing ip_masq_ftp module. (I've been quite lazy investigating
this one, I'll admit it ;)
- linuxconf: help windows are open in their full extension, no scroll
bars; what's more, the Communication tab of the PPP Interface doesn't
save properly new data. Again, not a LM 8.0 problem probably, I had to
modify the script by hand to solve it anyway.
- missing HOWTOs? I thought so when I opened the index.html that
organizes the HOWTOs and mini-HOWTO's (in english), but actually many of
the links are wrong: for instance you have two Access-HOWTO hyperlinks,
but the second one points to Adv-Bash_Scr-HOWTO.html. To correct ASAP.
- xmms segfaults with this message:
Gtk-CRITICAL **: file gtkitemfactory.c: line 1003
(gtk_item_factory_create_item): assertion `entry->path[0] == '/''
failed.
Gtk-WARNING **: invalid cast from (NULL) pointer to `GtkCheckMenuItem'
Segmentation fault
You've probably found a bug in XMMS, please visit
http://www.xmms.org/bugs and fill out a bug report.
OK, I'll fill out the bug report, but this really is strange, never had
a problem with XMMS before. Anyone else having problems with XMMS?
All in all, I'm a little disappointed: what I want is a rock solid LM,
even if I have to wait two more weeks. I take care of the Italian
documentation for Mandrakesoft, I've written favorable reviews of
previous LM releases and advised friends to try it, and I want to do
that again: which is why I hope these little, but very annoying problems
will be corrected ASAP (I'd suggest to provide a) the relevant updates
b) a web page explaining how to fix the problems and containing links to
the aforementioned updates).
Ciao
--
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dipartimento di Scienze [EMAIL PROTECTED]
del Linguaggio Then spoke the thunder DA
Universita' di Torino Datta: what have we given? (TSE)
Hige sceal the heardra, heorte the cenre,
mod sceal the mare, the ure maegen litlath. (Maldon 312-3)
