Fri, 09 Nov 2007
Upstream, Upstream, Upstream
When I find a bug in a Linux application, I as a good netizen try to report the bug somewhere (report nothing, expect nothing). A good place for such reports was the Red Hat Bugzilla. People there were the package maintainers who knew where the package was originated from, were subscribed to the appropriate mailing lists, and thus had good means of pushing the fixes to the original developers (aka "upstream"). Apparently, these days are over.
Nowadays, RH/Fedora developers either ignore the reports, and after few months just ping the reporter with "please verify that the bug still exists on an uptodate system, or we will close the bug" (it is real, see here), or they say "not a Fedora bug, please go upstream".
While I do not have a problem with going upstream per se, it is a bit annoying: I have to find out where the upstream is (whether the developers have some mailing list, bug tracking system, IRC channel or what), then subscribe to the mailing list or create the upstream Bugzilla account (which often takes several hours because of the greylisting inbetween), and re-report the problem.
As a minimum level of politeness, I would expect that every "go upstream" suggestion should include the description of where the upstream is. Even better, it would be nice if every package had an "upstream" attribute, where in the machine-parsable form one could find the exact location of upstream Bugzilla, Trac, mailing list or whatever.
Tue, 06 Nov 2007
XRandR
I have installed Fedora 8 on my
workstation. Everything works as expected, except the multihead support.
I am getting the "Requested Entity already in use!" error message.
The problem is that my xorg.conf uses two separate screens,
instead of one screen merged by XRandR extension (which is
apparently
the preferred way of doing dual-head now).
While not a bad thing per se, XRandR seems to be unusable for my dual head setup: I want the workspace switcher work separately for each head. With XRandR, there is only one big virtual screen area, so the workspace switcher switches both heads at once.
I think XRandR would be useful for my laptop which has 16:10 screen, so the aspect ratio for the external beamer would be different. Also, it could allow to see the lecture notes together with slides when doing a presentation. Here is a little RandR dualhead howto.
My dear lazyweb, does anybody know how to do a multi-screen setup (as opposed to one virtual screen area) in XRandR? For now, I have downgraded to the Fedora 7 version of the ATI driver, which works the way I want. Bug reported as #368531.