Upgrading to Fedora Core 6
I found Fedora Core 6 on a cover-DVD of Linux Magazine, which saved me having to download it using BitTorrent. The upgrade apparently went smoothly, although it surprised me that it took an hour and a half. I do have a lot of packages installed though.
On rebooting I was unable to bring up KDE. It displayed a message “Can’t load kde-base” then gave me a blank screen. No keys were responding except good old control-alt-backspace, which kills the X server.
I then brought up Gnome, from which I ran pup (the package updater) which downloaded and installed a whole load of upgrades. One more reboot and KDE worked just fine.
With this upgrade, I now have a rhythmbox bug that affects systems with more than one CD drive. If I try to play a CD in the first drive, rhythmbox detects it and offers for me to play it - but it won’t play if I click the Play button. If I eject the CD and put it into the second CD drive, the Play button works just fine. But if I start with the CD in the second drive, I need to move it to the first drive to play the tracks that were identified while it was in the second drive. At least I have a workaround until this bug is fixed.
Fonts have changed in Fedora Core 6. The default sans serif font is crisper and more readable than every, although I think the default serif font has slightly reduced readability.
A big plus is that most applications seem more responsive - in particular there is a big improvement with Firefox 1.5.0.8.