I upgraded my desktop at home to Fedora Core 2 this past week. Partly because I was home sick and bored and also because I was sick of not having DMA support in ATAPI CD and DVD burns. The fact that its taken this long for Linux to support it is really sad. But thankfully that’s over. I did a fresh install since I’ve never trusted upgrades.

I’ve been fairly happy with Fedora Core 1, given that you also use the apt/yum repositories of Fedora Extras, Freshrpms, and kde-redhat. I waited for all those projects to catch up and have FC2 support. Most of them had it for a few weeks, but I was lazy.

So, the install went okay, its pretty much the same as FC1s. As the install went, I noticed a lot more java support, mostly with the base of gcj and stuff from the GNU Classpath project. (As a total aside, from the Classpath homepage I see there are a few open source JVMs I had no idea existed. I’ll have to check those out.) Of course, due to licensing, no official VM from Sun.

I hit a snag right away with FC2 when it came to video drivers. Since I have an Nvidia card, I generally use the proprietary drivers from Nvidia because I like eye candy like 3D screen savers (especially the Really Slick Screensavers) and things like Unreal Tournament. FC2’s default 2.6 kernel is compiled with the “4k stacks” option turned on. This totally braeks Nvidia’s current driver for linux, which appearently needs 8k stacks. Nvidia said its next driver release will play nice with 4k stacks, but they aren’t out yet.

The second snag is that there is no firewire support out of the box. It appears that the 2.6 kernel that FC2 ships with had really broken firewire support, so they turned it off. For most PC users, this probably isn’t a big deal. For me it is, as I have an iPod that I use under Linux with gtkpod. Currently, my firewire card exists just to talk to my iPod so this is disheartening. (In the near future, I’ll probably be getting a camcorder with firewire out, if only to make DVDs of my child.)

In either case, both of these problems can be overcome by recompiling the kernel by getting the latest clean/Linus version of the kernel. Unfortunately, for some users this is too difficult of a task. Since I’ve been building kernels since Jan 1994, I suppose I can live with it. It also appears that Fedora released a new kernel rpm today that addresses the firewire problem. However, the nvidia issue is still there. So it looks like I’m hand compiling.

Chris Stamborski reports that he couldn’t get pvmove (an LVM command) to work with FC2 due to something in the 2.6 kernel. However, earlier today he told me on IRC he found a fix for it. I’m bugging him to get a reference on it. I don’t need it currently, but it never hurts to have the info.

On the plus side, FC2 might have been worth upgrading if only for the ATAPI CD/DVD burner DMA support. I burned a few CDs last night at full 32x and my system didn’t even break a sweat. With a 2.4 kernel, it bogged down the system something fierce to where I couldn’t web surf. The whole PIO access to hard drive just kept the system too busy. It felt like when you’d format a floppy under Windows 3.1.

Also, it seems snappier on the same hardware. It probably has to do with scheduler and IO scheduler fixes.

To sum it up, I’m mostly happy with FC2, and I’m thinking about putting it on my laptop. I’ll be even happier after a kernel compile and I have firewire again.