Hi,
I installed the Fisher beta on 2 systems, my home system and a notebook
(ThinkPad 770X).
The installation on my home system was very smooth, and every piece of
hardware in it looks to be working (P3 with SiS chipset, G400DH, SBlive,
3c905c, aic7880, avermedia tvcam98).
The installation on the ThinkPad was also smooth, but it had a lot of
problems with PCMCIA after installation, and video still needed to be
configured with some care, although it was much easier then any previous
version of RedHat.
The PCMCIA problems where listed in the releasenotes as being
problemetic, so I will not go into the problems to much. The main
problem I had was that the PCMCIA TokenRing adapter was giving
"ibmtr_cs: MapMemPage: Bad offset" errors. I have had these errors in
the past with 2.0/2.2 kernels, but in the latest 2.2 kernels with
current pcmcia-cs package they had been solved.
The video problems looks to be an issue with the trident_drv module. For
some reason it correctly detects 8MB of video memory, and then proceeds
in telling it is only going to use 4 of it. With this the screen got
totally messed up, adding the videoram 8192 setting to the adapters
device settings in the XF86Config-4 file solved the problem for me.
Another issue with the video install was that the installer correctly
identified the Trident Cyber9397DVD videochip and amount of videomemory,
but was unable to detect the type of LCD panel, and came back with plain
VGA sync ranges. And even after selecting 'Generic LCD panel with
1280x1024 resolution' it suggested as a default resolution a resolution
that was to high for the LCD. The thing is that if I look through the
/var/log/XFree86.0.log file I can see that it managed to detect I have a
1280x1024 resolution LCD panel.
(--) TRIDENT(0): TFT Panel 1280x1024 found
Would it not be possible for the installer to also detect this?
Because of the problems with PCMCIA I did not test the beta really on
the ThinkPad, so I don't know if there where other problems.
Some other issues I came across on both machines where:
- graphical installer uses XFree86 3.3.6. Why not 4.0.2?
- release notes say Netscape 4.x is depricated, yet it is still the
default (I had to manually select to install Mozilla).
- shipped versions of libpcap and tcpdump are very old, much newer ones
are available from www.tcpdump.org
- default gnome desktop look is not as nice as Helix.
In general the new installer was very smooth. Now that framebuffer is
finally used for the installation, graphical install finally works on
several machines (mainly mobiles) where it never worked before.
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