So to my surprise, FC5 really sucked out of the box on my laptop. Things that didn't work:
1. Wireless (needed to go get a proprietary firmware for Intel)
2. NTP server synch with no network basically halts the startup process
3. Media buttons (volume up/down/mute)
4. NFS mounting of my terrastation volume (RPC Timeout and then Segmentation Fault)
5. Fonts
So I fixed 1 pretty quick by hooking up an ethernet cable.
But #2 required booting into single-user mode (add -s to the grub boot line) and turning off the option to sync the clock (rm /etc/ntp/step-tickers)
Media buttons required setting the keyboard shortcuts in System->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts.
Fixing NFS took alot of effort including looking at the packets in ethereal. The RPC Timeout was the most frustrating. Finally I figured out that terastation was doing dns lookups and I didn't have it setup to route to any dns servers. It just happened that the timeout of DNS and the response packet from the mount command were almost always timed such that the client timed out 1/2 a second before the dns timed out and the response was sent. Once I got it so it could see a dns server the mount command core dumped. ulimit -c unlimited and gdb mount core showed nothing useful (symbols were stripped). So I went looking for the mount source. I found it at kernel.org (util-linux). After compilation running mount just worked. yay. stupid friggin redhat with their custom patches.
Ok, the last thing (so far...) Fonts. My Google personalized page looked like total crap and I had to scroll alot more than I used to. And Google Finance's charts are all but worthless cause Flash doesn't display any text at all. I solved that problem in ubuntu by installing ghostscript-fonts. Unfortunately they were already installed on fedora.
So I went hunting for the standard MS web core fonts... found several different RPMS of them. None worked. Lots and lots of research and editing of /etc/X11/fs/config later and still nothing... Going to fonts:/// in nautilus showed like 10 really basic fonts still. None of the standard ones I installed. Bummer. So I kept hunting. Finally I found that there's this fontconfig package installed. It has it's config in /etc/fonts/ but it doesn't include even some of the standard packages like the ghostscript or Type1 URW fonts that were installed with Fedora. What a crock. Somehow it finds the Bitstream ones in a subdir of /usr/share/fonts, but nothing else. So I added a local.conf with the following dirs:
Woohoo! Firefox now has a much better look. But still no text in flash on Google finance.
Oh well... it's 5am and I've been at this for like 10 hours now. I think I need to go to sleep. I hate Fedora now. I'll probably switch back to ubuntu on June 1 when the final badger comes out.
