7:37 p.m.
Hello, everyone,
I installed the Fedora 12 Xfce Spin yesterday and would like to take a
moment to say "Thanks!" for everyone's efforts putting it together. After
some initial glitches (see below), I managed to install it to my hard drive
and am posting from it right now. It has been stable thus far, and it sure
is fast. I'm looking forward to using it more. I will try to stick as
closely as possible to the apps you've pre-selected (although I installed
OpenOffice.org and TeX Live because I need them).
I've only recently discovered Xfce; I've experimented with it as a secondary
desktop environment in Linux Mint 8 and Pardus 2009.1 as well as playing
with the Live CD of Dreamlinux 3.5. So I'm not competent to judge how the
F12 Xfce Spin compares technically with those others. I will say that I like
the look of your implementation -- it's clean and polished, without being
flashy. (Dreamlinux is pretty but it seems to be trendy to imitate the Mac
OS X interface. I appreciate that Fedora is willing to buck that trend).
Although I'm new to your Xfce Spin, I'm not a first-time Fedora user. I had
a good run with Fedora 9 Sulphur (the GNOME version) and I used it until it
reached its EOL. At that point I started distro-hopping and have been away
from Fedora for a while. But I found myself missing the Fedora Forums and
the bright people who know how to fix Fedora when Something Breaks.
Below I'd like to attach some feedback on the Live CD's performance. I sent
an e-mail to Christoph and he suggested that I provide more details
concering how it ran on my hardware (since he didn't experience these
problems firsthand). I took notes this evening and wrote them up. I know
this isn't very technical but I hope it will be of help to you. (Please
don't interpret this as a complaint, because that isn't my intention). My
hardware is fairly good, so I'm puzzled as to why the Live CD's performance
was so sluggish ... I don't know if it's all the abrt daemon's fault or not
(or if there's something weird about my hardware).
As a non-programmer, I'm fortunate to have a choice among so many good Linux
distros. Of course this wouldn't be possible without so many talented and
dedicated Linux developers -- like you -- who are willing to freely share
their time and knowledge. I tip my hat (I won't make bad pun of saying "my
Fedora" :-( ) to all of you. With best wishes,
=david
McAllen, Texas, USA
==========
Background
a. The .iso was downloaded on my Mint 8 partition via BitTorrent
(Transmission) and its checksum was verified.
b. The .iso was burned to CD-R using Brasero at 8x speed (the slowest speed
available on my optical drive).
c. Each CD-R was also checked with the "Verify and Boot" option of the Live
CD. They both passed.
d. The performance was nearly identical for both CDs.
----------
Results of Live CD Performance
1. HP CD-R 52x 700 MB
Time from beginning of boot (after the auto countdown finished) until GDM
login screen:
10:40 (10 min. 40 sec.)
Saw the Fedora 'f' logo fill in completely at:
8:00
Saw cursor appear with spinning blue circle at:
9:45
Boot messages [yellow warning triangle] read:
Everything was 'OK' except for the abrtd message:
"Starting abrt daemon: abrtd : Failed to start:
timeout waiting for child [FAILED]"
This CD had a kernel crash ("kernel oops") the very
first time it was booted. I tried to use the Automatic
Bug Reporting Tool to report the problem--I'm not sure
if it worked. No kernel crashes occurred with subsequent
uses.
-----
2. TDK CD-R 52x 700 MB
Time from beginning of boot (after the auto countdown finished) until GDM
login screen:
10:30 (10 min. 30 sec.)
Saw the Fedora 'f' logo fill in completely at:
8:00
Saw cursor appear with spinning blue circle at:
9:30
Boot messages [yellow warning triangle] read:
Everything was 'OK' except for the abrtd message:
"Starting abrt daemon: abrtd : Failed to start:
timeout waiting for child [FAILED]"
(I didn't experience any kernel crashes with this
TDK CD).
-----
3. Comparison with installed HD performance
(on partition /sda12):
Time from GRUB menu until GDM login screen:
0:26 (26 seconds)
----------
System Specs
AMD Athlon II X2 240 (Regor) 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Seagate Barracuda 320 GB HD,
Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 integrated GPU, Samsung SH-S222L DVD-RW