The Day After

I've been using F14 for a day now, and it's at a more advanced stage than previous incarnations of Fedora have been after an equivalent time. That's not to say it's perfect, though, and there are still a bunch of things that range from minor irritants to outright pains in the arse. I don't know how many of them are actual bugs that need to be reported; I'll have a better idea of that in the days to come.



Anyway, in no particular order...

Authentication
It seems that anything that requires elevated privileges just isn't going to work from the gui. Despite the fact that I've disabled SELinux, I'm not allowed do anything that needs root. SELinux is definitely disabled, so I assume it's just a failure to ask for authorisation. Updates, firewall settings, whatever... it tries to execute the command, then just says 'no' without asking for passwords. When I try to run system-config-firewall, for example, I get
org.fedoraproject.slip.dbus.service.PolKit.NotAuthorizedException.org.fedoraproject.config.firewall.auth: which has a hint of the truncated about it, and certainly looks SELinux related, but I'm not sufficiently familiar yet with dbus to say one way or the other. In any case, it's an example of what occurs every time I try something naughty. There's no problem at all when any of these are run as root from the command line.

Firefox
I mentioned previously my chagrin at not being able to use Tabmix Plus; curiously, despite the fact that it refused to update the existing addon, downloading the extension again fixed the problem. No idea why it objected in the first place.

Flash, on the other hand, is still giving problems. I added the Adobe repo and installed flash-plugin thence, and all seemed well. Until, that is, I tried to go fullscreen in youtube. I got a big gray screen with no image, and upon pressing Escape, I got a blank video. This happens consistently, but it's the only problem flash has presented thus far.

There's also the weird phenomenon with regard to animated gifs. I haven't nailed this down definitively, but it seems that any gif that has a transparent background fails; it'll only show the first frame, followed by blankness. This means that one sees a blinking frame. Gifified movie clips, etc, work fine. Looking at one of these images in eog shows it as intended; it seems only to be in firefox. Investigations continue.

Themes
My gnome theme of choice is Azenis, and it's fairly inconsistently applied; some frames in certain windows will be unazenified. The worst looking is k3b, but as that's a KDE app I'm less surprised by that (although it looked fine in previous versions of Fedora). There seems no rhyme or reason to its (lack of) application of the colour scheme.

Missing Packages
These'll come in time, I imagine. I've no idea why I had to add screen; it's one of the packages one would think should be included by default, but at least it was available. The same can't be said (as of this writing) for avidemux, midentify, mediainfo and a few others whose names escape me at the moment. I really should learn to write these things down. And before you point it out, yes, I know I can recreate midentify by adding a few options to mplayer

Nvidia
By adding the nvidia drivers from Fusion, I got my TV working; after a fashion. It's a Medion LCD with a resolution of 1366x768, but the computer steadfastly refuses to give it better than 1024x768 (and a few lower ones, but always with a 4:3 AR). This means that the picture is somewhat distorted, and in order to watch stuff I have to tell mplayer to give it a funny aspect ratio so it'll be watchable. I'm connecting to the TV via composite cables, but I doubt this has anything to do with it.

When I manually tweak xorg.conf, I'm just told that the mode is invalid, and it's ignored.


That's It
Overall, as I said, the above list has fewer items in it than would've been there in earlier editions, and I'm confident that most (if not all) of them will go away soon, through my own efforts or those of the fine boys and girls of Fedora.