Fedora and Masochism

So I installed Fedora 10 on my laptop the other day and: what a mess! My first issue was that X wasn't working. I actually helped resolve that the other day with an X developer in Ubuntu, so I applied the same fix, and voila.

Second, I couldn't log in! I would go to GDM, login, and then it would wait interminably. I eventually tried reinstalling GDM and rebooting. That ended up working, somewhat. However, all I got was a blank panel and a few icons. I have now populated that panel. Did something fail to copy over the items? Did they fail to load? This was caused by one of two issues:

• dbus-1.2.6. What utter fail. Yes, it is a security risk, but the solution is not to update a fundamental package that will break the desktops of all your users who bother to diligently install security fixes. Yikes. It's still not totally resolved. A relevant Fedora/Redhat bug: 475068; freedesktop bug: 18229
• A gstreamer issue. My new user account had ~/.gstreamer-0.10 with permissions that prevented the creation of the file registry.i386.bin, without which gstreamer segfaults. Yikes!

I'll note that the gstreamer issue also took away:

• my sound, and
• my power management! I don't really understand how that worked, but I didn't have suspend or hibernate, or the battery applet while that gstreamer file couldn't be made. Relevant bug: 475125

The errors I received due to the gstreamer (as reported in /var/log/messages and ~/.xsession-errors) include:

• gnome-settings-[8894]: segfault at 4 ip 00fef0f5 sp bffb8020 error 4 in libgstreamer-0.10.so.0.18.0[f6b000+bc000]
• gnome-power-man[8893]: segfault at 4 ip 06e320f5 sp bfe37190 error 4 in libgstreamer-0.10.so.0.18.0[6dae000+bc000]
• mixer-applet2[9015]: segfault at 4 ip 06e320f5 sp bfd86bd0 error in 4 in libgstreamer-0.10.so.0.18.0[6dae000+bc000]

Finally, my stylus does not work. My configuration expects /dev/input/wacom which is apparently wrong on Fedora. I need to find out which device file it becomes associated with, and then all will be well once more...