[SOLVED] Very little joy in Beta 1

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[SOLVED] Very little joy in Beta 1

Postby House » Apr 11th, '11, 03:25

Unlike other folks, I did not have a particularly positive experience installing Mageia beta 1 (x86_64)...

I began with a simple install in VirtualBox. No issues to report. However, once I moved to do an actual install on my test rig, things went downhill quickly.

Installer bugs
There are at least three bugs in the installer...
(And rightly or wrongly, the installer is where any distro makes its "first impression"):

- Bug 49. (Yes, 501 is still a number)
(This bug is massively disprutive to users, and it is utterly trivial to fix. It would be a blessing if it got fixed before the release of "beta" 2.)

- Required package "shorewall" was not found (and thus I had no firewall).

- The installer spontaneously shuts down when installing the bootloader (reproduced three times). I can go back and complete the install by rebooting and using the "upgrade" feature. However, as a practical matter, I would not do so if I were evaluating a distro for actual use.

The only thing even remotely unusual about the machine where I did the test install is that it is admittedly overpopulated with Linux distros. (It's my test machine, after all, and it's got maybe a dozen different distros installed in various partitions.)

Update to an existing Mandriva 2010 installation (with KDE 4.5)
An update to an existing Mandriva 2010 installation installed without incident. User accounts with relatively "vanilla" KDE desktops seemed to work fine after the update. However, one user account, which made extensive use of multiple activities, was subject to literally constant plasma crashes. (Needless to say, that system was reverted to its pre-update status.)

One last note: the algorithm that estimates installation time could use some attention. The upgrade was performed on an admittedly low-powered (Atom) machine, but the estimated times varied wildly--from a low of 1 hour, to a high of 7 (!) hours. The update actually took something over 90 minutes, but seeing an estimated 7-hour update time might motivate a user to stop the install and look elsewhere.

The one high point is that Mageia is the first distro to correctly identify an AirLink WiFi dongle and load the correct firmware/kernel driver. A good and happy thing.
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House
 
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Re: Very little joy in Beta 1

Postby patrickdarcy » Apr 11th, '11, 20:08

after i left message here about the sound it seems i got bigger problems.

after not getting sould to work i returned to mandrifva2010.2. then i decided to try again
with mageia. i did a fresh install , not an update and i let the machine take in loads
of updates after the install.

when i tried to reboot my hard drive kept getting stuck.

i was getting a message "resetting hard drive " this was the same problem i had
when i attempted to install earlier versions of mageia.

i tried to reboot into guest user and i get a red screen sometimes which is telling
me i am root but still wont quite boot all the way.
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Re: Very little joy in Beta 1

Postby ennael » Apr 11th, '11, 20:18

House wrote: Required package "shorewall" was not found (and thus I had no firewall).


Indeeed... Added in lists for beta2.
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Re: Very little joy in Beta 1

Postby mikala » Apr 11th, '11, 20:23

House wrote:Update to an existing Mandriva 2010 installation (with KDE 4.5)
An update to an existing Mandriva 2010 installation installed without incident. User accounts with relatively "vanilla" KDE desktops seemed to work fine after the update. However, one user account, which made extensive use of multiple activities, was subject to literally constant plasma crashes. (Needless to say, that system was reverted to its pre-update status.)

It could be nice to provide the backtrace of all thoses plasma crash if possible. Without more information it could be quite difficult to fix them even if KDE 4.5.5 is not supported by mandriva ;o) .
Just in case did your try your upgrade before kdebase4-workspace 2:4.6.2-1.mga1 ? because i'm wondering if your crash is not related to kde #261593 and if so it should be fixed since this kdebase4-workspace version.
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Re: Very little joy in Beta 1

Postby House » Apr 12th, '11, 00:08

I should have been more clear. I assume that the plasma crashes are due to flaws in KDE, and not in Mageia. I suspect that anyone moving from 4.5 to 4.6 would experience similar problems, on any distro. I offered the report mostly as a cautionary note, perhaps to be mentioned in a "known issues" or errata document.
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Re: Very little joy in Beta 1

Postby House » Apr 13th, '11, 01:03

In case it's of value/use to anyone...

Turns out that perhaps KDE is not the culprit behind the plasma crashes in the Madriva->Mageia update. I just did a fresh install (not an "update") of Mageia Beta 1 on that same machine, and the user account with multiple activities is perfectly fine.

(Offered as grist for the mill.)
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