Fedora 15, day 2

So, as most of the problems solved and all stuff working fine, I still have couple of issues.

Xfce4 keyboard layout switcher (xfce4-xkb-plugin)

This is a small handy plugin to change keyboard layouts and show current layout flag in the panel. All works fine, but sometimes it looses the setting for key sequence that should change layouts. Nothing dramatic here and can be readjusted, but a bit annoying. Strange thing is that the problem appears randomly.

Suspend and Hibernate

Ohhh, this is an old story. I had problems with suspend since Fedora 13 through Fedora 14 and up to now. In Fedora 14 my laptop was not suspending properly in most of the cases. My thoughts about it were mostly related to NetworkManager, since the chances of proper suspend were increasing if I disconnect all my connections.

In Fedora 15 my laptop suspends very fast and with no visible problems, but it fails to recover on resume. The monitor stays blank (as if there is no power given on it at all) and nothing recovers except for the keyboard lights and other LEDs on my laptop.

Hibernate didn’t work before and is still broken. When I try to put laptop into this mode, I see some attempts to do something (like network connections being disconnected and screen is locked), but then nothing happens and I am getting connected back and that’s it.

I bet this has to do with a particular hardware (have HP 6730b laptop), since for other people things work well.

Video Drivers

As my laptop has Intel graphics chipset, I see some misbehaver. Sometimes screen is not properly refreshed. Other times when I boot up a system to login screen – it is not shown (just black screen) and I need to switch to text TTY and then back to X server for it to be displayed correctly. Don’t know what exactly is going on here, but pisses me off quite a bit.

Other

One more tiny thing which is still not fixed is IOMMU. I had the intel_iommu=off flag in /etc/grub.conf since Fedora 14 and still have to keep it there, though things are getting better. In previous release my laptop wouldn’t boot at all without this flag, while in Fedora 15 the absence of such flag just causes a lot of warnings during the boot time.

I also removed the vga=792 flag from grub.conf. Used it in previous versions to set proper resolutions of text mode, but it gives some conflicts, related to framebuffer and my guess is that it has to do with kernel mode setting. I can use vga=792 only if I put nomodeset flag, but then my X server resolution is getting lost.

Meanwhile I have also played around some other window managers and desktop environments (just to see whats available) like LXDE, E16 (Enlightenment) and Openbox. Still think that Xfce4 is the most suitable for me at this time.