LWN: Comments on "Fedora 9 released"

Fedora slow keys and stuttering response

HugoA — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:02:22 +0000

Also, you can try to disable smooth scrolling in firefox (in options under advanced ->
general). Ironically, disabling it makes scrolling a lot smoother for me.

FC2/3 was a long time ago, and I've never seen this stuttering (been with fedora since FC6).

Blaming Python?

AnswerGuy — Sun, 18 May 2008 09:39:15 +0000

Perhaps blaming the language for the programmer's mistake makes no sense.

You say it's a backtrace. In Python that happens when someone didn't
anticipate some exception or chose not to catch it.

If you're going to suggest that the choice of programming language is somehow wrong then
you'll have to explain just exactly what this backtrace is and why a competent programmer
would have been unable to avoid it. (For example if the backtrace pointed to a bug in one of
the Python standard libraries, or if some bug in the runtime/interpreter triggered it, or
triggered some exceptional condition such as OOM, that, in turn, cause this.

Are you seriously suggesting that higher quality of code would have been likely if they had
chosen C, C++, Perl?

(Personally I have found that the code in Anaconda is just about the worst quality Python
programming I've never seen. Their kickstart parser is fragile and completely inadequate even
for the limited exposure to sysadmins. But I don't blame that on their choice of language.
Also the whole process is so tightly coupled together that it seems impossible for them to
support something as simple as: %pre does all my partitioning, filesystem formatting, and
mounting --- everything is on /mnt/sysimage and I've generated my own fstab; skip to the
package installation!)

(If they had than then there'd be no need for an rpmstrap command --- you'd just run anaconda
with the correct "--skip" argument and your virtual iSCSI installation would be all done where
you're Xen, KVM, VMWare or whatever could go pick it up and use it).

Bah.

--
JimD

Fedora slow keys and stuttering response

proski — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:00:24 +0000

Firefox can be unresponsive sometimes, but other applications running at the same time don't seem to be affected.

Fedora slow keys and stuttering response

pr1268 — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:50:04 +0000

Just curious, do recent versions of Fedora still have that dreaded "stuttering" response? I'm referring to latency issues with mouse pointer movement, keystroke response, and page scrolling most visible when running Firefox, noticeable back in the FC2/FC3 days. A Fedora user at my local LUG said it was due to a near-constant stream of memory page faults.

I've never noticed such latency issues in any distro other than Red Hat and Fedora...

Fedora 9 released

proski — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:21:56 +0000

At night, the slow keys come.

Fedora 9 released

dougg — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:41:29 +0000

In trying to upgrade a dual boot machine (w2000/Fedora8) with the i386 DVD it failed with
"duplicate labels". Strange, upgrades from FC5->FC6->FC7->F8 worked fine on the same machine
in the past. And Fedora on that machine is "clean" in the sense only "yum update"s have been
done.

I'm not the only one having problems:
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=E800C1E1-17A4-0F78-316FA...
and I also got the "Try 2" error.

F9 is starting to look three quarter baked.

Upgrade is broken again :-(

proski — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:36:59 +0000

GUI upgrade for i386 shows a Python backtrace as soon as I select upgrade. Details belong to bugzilla, of course, but we need to think why such major bugs happen over and over again. Perhaps Python is not really suitable for that kind of task? And of course even very basic testing would have discovered the problem. While many people, myself included, track rawhide on some systems, the installer appears to get very little attention.

Preupgrade

DG — Wed, 14 May 2008 06:08:28 +0000

This page might be a better link - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=48938

Preupgrade

jkowing — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:52:54 +0000

Thanks for the tip!  I've been hoping Fedora would someday have this option available.  It may
seem a small thing, but it makes upgrading to a new release seem so much nicer and easier.  I
just did an over-the-net distribution upgrade on Ubuntu that worked pretty well.  Great job
Fedora folks!

Preupgrade

chema — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:12:25 +0000

Just If someone is interested. You can find preupgrade rpm's here, just in case you'll like to try this kind of live upgrade (from F7,F8 -> F9). I'm just upgrading my laptop with it. -- Chema