Common F9 bugs

Fedora 9 - Common Bugs and Known Issues

This page documents common bugs in Fedora 9 and, if available, fixes or workarounds for these problems. If you find your problem in this page, do not file a bug for it. Where appropriate, a reference to the current bug(s) in Bugzilla is included.

Release Summary, Announcement and Notes

• Releases/9/ReleaseSummary - Make sure you read this page and related references in detail.

My Bug Is Not Listed

Not every bug is listed in this page. You can use bugzilla queries in the bottom of this page for that. We have collected this based on commonly discussed issues in our mailing lists and forums. If you believe any particular bug report is missed out here and if you have wiki access, add it this page or contact RahulSundaram with the bugzilla report number explaining why you believe that particular report qualifies as a common issue.

Common Issues

Proprietary (third-party) video drivers

link to this item

Fedora ships a new X.Org X11 server (1.4.99) which brings a large number of benefits to users and a new ABI as described in the feature list.

All drivers contained within Fedora have been ported to use this ABI and mostly work as expected. Third-party drivers from some vendors (AMD (fglrx)) are not yet compatible with this new X.Org ABI. (nVidia has also taken their time, but as of May 28, 2008, an updated driver is available from them and from third-party repositories.) This is not a bug in Fedora, nor even something Fedora can fix, only the third-party vendors can update the drivers due to their choice of licensing. Refer LWN for more details at

http://lwn.net/Articles/283291/

You can usually find proprietary drivers in third party repositories such as Livna at http://rpm.livna.org

Note that Fedora Project does not recommend or support proprietary software.

Touchpad doesn't work

link to this item - #439386 along with 232630, 172797, 436641.

Touchpad doesn't work on a number of systems.

Some Samsung hard disks crash the installer

link to this item - Bugzilla: #442457

Some Samsung hard disks respond to certain queries with a model string that ends in a slash ("/"). This confuses HAL and produces an error that prevents normal installation, although the Live installer is unaffected.

We are working on an patch to fix the problem. For now, users are advised to install from Live or use a different hard disk model if possible.

Emacs not upgrading cleanly

link to this item - Bugzilla: #394131

If you are upgrading to Fedora 9 and use emacs, you must upgrade to the latest version of emacs for your prior release to ensure a clean upgrade. Fedora 8 users must have emacs-22.1-10.fc8 or later, while Fedora 7 users must have emacs-22.1-7.fc7.

Emacs flyspell-mode produces "Enabling Flyspell mode gave an error"

link to this item - Bugzilla: #448414

As a result of the dictionary consolidation work , attempts to use M-x flyspell-mode, or to automatically enable it via lines in your .emacs file such as:

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook
'(lambda () (flyspell-mode t)))
(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook
'(lambda () (flyspell-prog-mode t)))

fail with the error message quoted above. One circumvention is to (also) add to your .emacs file the following:

;; for Fedora 9 where ispell dictionaries are gone ...
(setq ispell-program-name "hunspell")

README-BURNING-ISOS document is ugly

link to this item - Bugzilla: #446092

Due to a problem with the XML conversion package xmlto, the README-BURNING-ISOS-en_US.txt file on the Fedora 9 ISO images is hard to read. You can find a current readable version at: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/readme-burning-isos/

Xfce-media-installs

link to this item - Bugzilla: #446621

The Xfce group may show as available for install on media installed (cd/dvd), when the Xfce packages are not available on the media. The install will complete, but no Xfce desktop will be available. After the install, run a 'yum groupinstall XFCE' or install the Xfce group from the add/remove software GUI. This will install the Xfce desktop.

Less Common Issues

system-config-printer won't start

link to this item - Bugzilla: #443205

If there is a print server on the local network that advertises a Windows shared printer (anything with a smb:// URL), the printer administration tool system-config-printer may fail to start.

This will be fixed with a soon-to-be-released update.

GDM language selector isn't available initially

link to this item - Bugzilla: #445631

The very first time GDM starts up the language selector will not appear when a user is selected. Subsequent runs of GDM work okay. This is going to be addressed in an F9 update.

Installer crashes when customizing packages, if using Russian

link to this item - Bugzilla: #445517

Due to a problem with the Russian translation for the installer, if you attempt to customize your packages the installer may crash when you click a checkbox in the customization screen.

You can work around this problem by either choosing to customize packages after installation, or by installing in a different language, and changing the system language to Russian after installation.

Behavior Changes

NetworkManager now handles static configuration files

link to this item

!NetworkManager can now handle the static network configuration files written by Anaconda and system-config-network, which reside in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts.

This may cause problems if you enable both the network service and the NetworkManager service.

New Package Manager (PackageKit)

link to this item

Fedora 9 includes PackageKit , a new distribution-neutral package management system. It has some important differences from the older system - read the PackageKitFaq for details.

References

• KernelCommonProblems