Fedora 12 Review

All I wanted to do was simply update Fedora 11 to Fedora 12. I should have know that it was not going to be easy, when the “Install or upgrade and existing system” option led to a blank screen. Being an optimist, I used the “Install system with basic video driver,”  which has an upgrade option. The upgrade seemed to go OK. When I rebooted the system, I got a …

blank screen. Fedora 12 still uses Legacy Grub, so I had it replace Linux Mint’s Grub2. The ugrade saved my old settings, which was good. I couldn’t boot Linux Mint, because my old setting reference menu.lst. However, I could boot CentOS.  At least, something was still working. Once again, I have to problems. Fedora 12 leads to a blank screen, and I can’t boot Linux Mint.

Digging through my memory bank of prior screen display issues, I modified the boot parameter to include vga=ask, which allows me to choose the screen resolution. I selected the value of 323, which is 1024×768 32-bit color. It worked. Compared  to openSUSE’s YaST,  the Display application under System->Preferences leaves a lot to be desired. It showed the correct display information. I clicked OK, and then rebooted. Once again, I got a blank screen. Reboot again, with VGA=0×323 , since it is a hex value, appended to kernel command line. This time I modified /boot/grub/grub.conf to add vga=323 to the kernel parameters. I sure hope I don’t have to go through this exercise with every kernel upgrade.

Once, I was able to boot Fedora 12, I found that it did not recognize the Ralink RT2501 USB Wireless Adapter. The lsusb command showed that the kernel recognized the adapter, and lsmod showed no rt* driver. Fedora 12 did not even recognize a different USB Wireless Adapter, which was recognized by Linux Mint 8. To really top things off, Fedora 12 did not even recognize my PCMCIA WiFi card with an Atheros chipset. This is the first time any distro did not have a driver for this card. The upgrade failed to update the software repository information in the software manager. Since I have no idea what else went wrong with the upgrade, I did a new install. At least, I knew how to solve the video problem. An install from scratch fixed the WiFi problem, which tells me that the upgrade failed miserably.

The install brought to light other problems. Immediately after the system boots, the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool starts flashing it red light. From the backtrace, it looks like there is an apic driver problem. Rebooting the system no longer works. It hangs with the message “Restarting…Restarting System.” The only solution is to turn the power off and back on. At least, there is consistency. Power down stops with the message “Shutting down…Power down.” Alas, the system is still on, but in a non-responsive state.

Since Fedora 12 uses Legacy Grub, I installed Grub in the boot record of the partition. Fedora 12 has one short /boot/grub/grub.conf file. The only entry is for the running kernel, and the timeout is zero.  I can easily modify the grub.conf file to boot CentOS, but Linux Mint 8. The question is whether to use Grub2 in the MBR, or role Linux Mint  8 back to Legacy Grub. The final answer to this question will appear in the article about Linux Mint 8.

In summary, I must say that this is not one of the best releases of Fedora. The upgrade option does not work. The install does not select the correct graphics driver. This marks the first time I have seen such consistent kernel oops messages. Finally, shutdown and power-off simply halt the processor, but do not reboot or power-off, respective;ly. I know Fedora is on the bleeding edge, but does it have to bleed so profusely. I am also concerned that Fedora is moving in a direction that does not support older computers. I installed this release on a HP pavilion ze4300 with 512 MiB of memory.