I installed Fedora 13 on Friday the 13th. Friday the 13th as unlucky day may be a myth, but my experience with Fedora 13 was not.
The first problem ws the install DVD boot menu. If I touched any key, including the cursor keys, the boot menu would hang. The only option was to let the clock run down to perform an install. It acted like the GRUB 2 menu problem that I encounter with Linux Mint 8. After the boot menu, there were no problems with the install.
I installed Fedora on an HP Pavilion ze4300 laptop that only has 512 megabytes of memory. Since Fedora 13 includes XFCE as a graphical desktop, I decided to try it, instead of Gnome. Alas, the venture with XFCE came to a quick end. When I attempted to login to XFCE, I would immediately be taken back to the login screen. Not being in the mood to debug the XFCE login issue, I reinstalled Fedora 13 using Gnome as the desktop. Now, I could login.
My woes with Fedora 13 were not over, nor was Friday the 13th. Considering that I was a bit behind in installing Fedora 13, I was surprised when the Update Manager reported only a few updates that needed to be installed, including the Update Manager, itself. Little did I know that this was the prelude to one huge update (628 packages plus dependencies), and to another set of problems.
Four times, the HP laptop halted with the message that the CPU was overheating. This message is new to me. I have noticed that the fan is always running at full-speed, when I am in Fedora 13. This problem does not occur when running Linux Mint or CentOS. I do not know what it is causing it, but it made downloading the updates very painful.
The Update Manager finally failed with the message that I needed to manually run the program “yum-complete-transaction.” I ran it, and it failed with the message that I needed to run “package-cleanup –problems, and package-cleanup –dupes.” After running these programs, I found the real problem which involved packaging errors. The python and python-develop packages contained the same file. A similar problem occurred between the qt library package and the qt-x11 package. These kind of packaging errors should have never reached the release stage. I finally was able to complete the update without the offending packages by using the command: yum update –skip-broken –exclude=qt-x11-1:4.6.3-8.fc13.i686.
On top of everything, Fedora 13 still contains the same problem as Fedora 12. When I attempt to reboot or shutdown, Fedora simply ends without rebooting or shutting down the system. The only solution is to manually power off the machine, and then power it back on.
It is no long Friday the 13th, but the heating problem still continues and only on Fedora 13. I am seriously considering replacing Fedora 13 with either PCLinuxOS XFCE or PCLinuxOS LXDE. Maybe I will install both, and let you know how it goes.
18 comments ↓
Today I just reinstalled my Acer laptop with Fedora 13 x86_64, replacing Ubuntu 10.04. In short: sweet! Everything worked great, and with the proprietary fglrx driver the laptop runs cool. Way better experience than Ubuntu. Fedora has a nicer, slicker theme and didn’t mess with Gnome that much.
I remember having the same problem as yours with the power on this laptop, but with Mandriva 2010…
Good luck in your linux journey!
That’s too bad you had so many problems. I was getting frustrated with Ubuntu (primarily because it doesn’t play nicely with my Apple bluetooth keyboard). I decided to give Fedora 13 a try on the same day you did. I didn’t experience any problems and the large (628 package) update went smoothly. After all that, I was also pleasantly surprised to find my Apple keyboard working under Fedora when it would not work under Ubuntu.
This all leads to one frustrating conclusion about Linux distros: Your hardware may dictate your experience with one flavor or another
You can thank the asshole that implemented changes in the scheduler and the other assholes that did not test it for the overheating.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/524281
It affects any distro using newer kernels.
I’ve tried many times and given up on Fedora. It looks great and is feature packed, but the package management is pathetic and inexcusable. Why would fedora make a final release where a significant number of users run into update problems on their first hour of using the system ? How do they expect people to actually use the system ?
Fedora 13 (Gnome) has been my first try of Fedora. First it was painfull coz nouveau driver. I had to install kmod-nvidia driver and after that no problems with graphics card.
I would say that generally “Fedora roadmap” is MUST for everyone wanna try Fedora. With that roadmap things work fine. Fedora 13 seems to be very, very stabile and really good release. At least with Gnome-desktop.
Your overheating problem is likely a kernel issue. F13 definitely has a much newer kernel than CentOS, and I’m guessing it’s newer than Mint too. Hard to be more specific without logs.
I just manually eyeballed the file lists of the qt and qt-x11 packages you mention, and I can’t see any conflicting files. What was the conflict exactly?
Oh, forgot – on the overheating issue, the alternative is it’s a process stuck at 100% CPU time. Run top (or install htop and run that) and check if some process is misbehaving and eating 100% CPU all the time.
I have installed many versions of Fedora. For this blog, I installed Fedora 13 on an hold HP laptop with only 512 megabytes of memory. Over the last few release, I have noticed a trend in which the shipped Linux kernel is less friendly with older machines. You also need to remember that Fedora is a bleeding edge release of the latest and greatest. Consequently, it has its rough edges.
I also believe that it is related one of the kernel drivers. When I get some more time, I will dig into it further. I haven’t given up on Fedora. It just got moved to the side for awhile.
When it first happened, running top was one of my first checks. No single process was hogging the CPU. It could, however, be one of the kernel threads.
As for the comment about the scheduler, I have had a chance to run any test to see if it is the culprit. While CFS has its advantages with multi-core servers, it is not the best scheduler for single or dual-core laptop CPUs. I am tempted to experiment with the BFS scheduler.
Trust me, overheating is related to load balancing between cores even when the system is idle.
The code was recently scrapped from the kernel, tou can find the discussion starting from the link provided (even if it is ubuntu related) and following the links to other bug reports and duplicates.
Since this blog deals with older machines, I write my observations based on those machines. As for the overheating issue, I tested five distros on the HP laptop (Linux Mint 9, Fedora 13, CentOS 5.5, PCLinuxOS XFCE, PCLinuxOS LXDE). The overheating problem only occurred on Fedora 13. Except for CentOS, all distros were running 2.6.31, or newer, kernel. CFS first appeared around 2.6.23. As for CFS, a major consideration is the setting of the parameters. I have not had time to compared the parameter values on all of the releases.
As for scrapping CFS, I have not a read a single thread that indicates says the code no longer exists in the kernel. Since its inception, CFS changes with each release, some features are added and others changed or removed, but CFS is still the scheduler. I checked the 2.6.35 code and CFS is still the scheduler, and there is no main-stream alternative.
This is what was scrapped:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6.35.y.git;a=commit;h=1dc89aec877583e3e42421be77b063724a4bbb07
Regards
By the way this is only one of the issues, if the driver for your GPU has issues with power management as well, overheating could start from the GPU.
Since most laptops have one single heat pipe running through CPU, GPU and northbridge, an overheating GPU would affect CPU sensors as well.
Not that makes more sense. Technically, the problem is not in the CFS code, but in the power management code. The work around was to temporarily remove the code for nohz maximum rate limit to eliminate the higher power consumption. Since it is a tunable parameter, there must be an issue with values received from the power management code.
On Fedora 13, I never had a chance to run any CPU intensive applications. Installing updates does not exactly require a lot of CPU or GPU cycles. In addition, the HP Pavilion ze4300 has a rather ancient ATI Radeon X1950 VGA controller. Not exactly, a heavy duty GPU. Plus, I run movies on Linux Mint 9 without any signs of heat failure. So far, this problem is unique to Fedora 13.
This aritcle achieved exactly what I wanted it to achieve.
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