Decided to try to migrate from 5.8, which, while speedy, and tuned to work very well over some years, is becoming a pain for new compiles increasingly running into dependency hell.
Grabbed the 6.0 RC1 iso and have noted the following so far:
Initial install screen:
Recommendation: Include the 'Test Memory' option like Ubuntu. This has proven very
handy on occasions when machines may be flakey. Likewise, include it as a boot option
on a fully installed system. I manually included the Memtest86 into /boot and made a linlo
entry for it on all my installed machines.
INSTALLER: 1. Pretty, but incredibly SLOOOW! It took well over an hour to do a full install!
2. The X probe set system resolution as 800x600 (video has not much ram). This
results in many of the bits on the install screens getting hosed:
-- Some text was chopped off along the bottom halves of the text,
-- Some sub-windows such as the partition summary broke with incomplete lines
-- Some of the selection bars in network configuration window were coverd by
other things
3. The installer has a title bar with typical iconify, minimize, and kill buttons. I didn't
dare try to see if they did anything, but it seems disaster waiting to happen.
4.. There's an 'auto-hid' XFCE panel lurking in the lower left. It includes....games???
So is this to give the itrepid curious explorer something to do during the hour it
takes to install?....which would grow even longer if the system is playing graphical
games during install!
Recommendations: Make sure that all screens will work at lower resolutions. This is
important for newer 'netbooks' that have less than 1024x768 and
video cards that aren't properly detected/set up during probing.
Make the traditional text insaller an option, since that should work
on nearly everything, and is dramatically faster.
Make sure the installer screen is bullet-proof to newbies and others
who might push buttons they shouldn't.
RALINK Wireless Driver has no firmware:
The RALINK driver as included with the distro kernel has no firmware, so when it loads, it shows a
wlan0 device which appears configurable, but doesn't work. This driver has recently become
an integral part of the kernel, and it's worked fine with various Ubuntu flavors I've tried using Live CD.
With the 'legacy' version of the RT61 driver, the source includes the firmware, and it's installed when
the package is compiled and installed on a running system. It stuffs the firmware files into /lib/firmware
when doing make install. If the firmware files were part of the kernel driver source compiled for VL 6,
they didn't get moved to the /lib/firmware directory.
Recommendation: Make sure the wireless firmware files are included with the kernel package.
Wicd Network/Wireless Manager:
Yet another attempt to be all thiings to all people for network config that only works with some
subset of reality.
This program has no (apparent) ability to use an ASCII WEP key. It has choices to enter other kinds of
kcys, such as HEX. The choice WEP (passphrase) *might* be what they intend, but 'passphrase' is
more associated with WPA and/or some routers that hash the 'phrase' into something other than
just sending it on as ASCII characters. When looking at iwconfig, *nothing* seems to appear in the Key
field. Likewise, entering a proper HEX key never makes it to the driver either. Basically, both HEX
and ASCII key use is broken.
When attempting to connect, if it *can't* it just spins forever. 'Cancel' does nothing other than
grey-out text and boxes in the window. Furthermore, if you use the system tray icon to QUIT,
it quits, but when restarted is hung in the spinning connect still, because QUIT doesn't actually kill the
running python daemon and monitor programs, it just removes the icon from the system tray.so
whatever state it's in remains, even if you log out and back in.
Recommendation: Can it until they get a version that actually works.
