Fedora 12

Fedora 12 is now out, yay! My love of Linux continues unabated.

As usual, did a clean install. I have separate drives and partitions for my data and home directory, so it's fairly easy to format and overwrite only the partitions holding the OS. I also do cross-disk backups. I simply don't have enough external storage or optical media to make off-machine backups these days.

The only OS files I save are as follows:
crontabs (root and normal users)
dhcpd.conf
fstab
hosts
httpd.conf & custom conf.d/ files
ifcfg-eth0
ntp.conf
resolv.conf
smb.conf
squid.conf
sshd_config
vsftpd.conf

I also backup my webalizer usage stats and apache logs.

Was a bit disappointed to find a shed load of yum updates awaiting. Would be nice to have a Fedora 12.1 or 12.2 etc. to include patches. Seems madness downloading a 4GB DVD then downloading a massive load of updates.

Getting the Nvidia driver installed and nouveau disabled was a nightmare, but got there eventually:

/boot/grub/grub.conf:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.31.6-166.fc12.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=234a6b84-be5a-47bc-bdac-6cf28a8dfa67 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=uk rhgb quiet rdblacklist=nouveau vmalloc=256m

However, there's a bug in Xorg right now and the whole display freezes for 10s every time I open the K menu. Grrrrr.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=234227

Haven't really noticed too much different between F11 and F12. New colour scheme, smaller taskbar by default, that's about it.

-- update --
After updating my laptop doesn't boot properly and hangs on the Plymouth bootloader screen and never shows the kdm login screen. If I hit Escape during the graphical boot then all is well, but it's annoying.

So spent all xmas with my laptop not booting cleanly and my desktop freezing every time I use the K menu or hit Alt-F2. At least the classic KDE 3 K menu works ok as a temp workaround (at it as a new Applet to the taskbar).

-- update 2 --
Is VMware Workstation getting slower with F12 or is it just me?

I've applied a load of tweaks and it's better, but disk I/O is dragging my machine down to a crawl.

At least my VMs now startup and shutdown without hanging on a black screen for 10 mins. For the past few months the VMware GUI would close before the VM had finished shutting down !!!