firefox 3 sluggish, fedora install notes

I actually wrote about 3 posts about my fedora installation issues, but I decided against boring everyone with the details (ok i will bore a little). The last straw came on Friday night when I discovered an application I long used (though occasionally) was ripped out of Ubuntu – i don’t really care if it is in Fedora, but it was the end of Ubuntu for me.

First – Firefox 3. I’m sure it isn’t just me, firefox 3 actually feels rather sluggish compared to 2 on my machine. Yes the RSS is lower, but switching tabs just has a soft laggy feel to it. I’m not sure if it is the videos I was looking at, but flash also seems terrible – it was always a bit of a cpu hog, but now the screen isn’t even close to keeping up. I can live without flash but I dunno, this isn’t what was advertised. I noticed fedora was using nspluginwrapper (not sure why, this is only a 32 bit box), and that was sucking some greenhouse gases, so i got rid of that, and it improved things ever so slightly, but it is still rather laggy. It could be X I guess – I will have to check that, but blender is very snappy (for this machine), and everything else runs fine. I’ve seen some forum threads where people suggest your machine is just too slow – umm, sure maybe, but if firefox 3 was meant to be so much faster than firefox 2 – how come it isn’t? And what have they done with the ‘invalid certificate’ window – made a right pigs breakfast of it, that’s what. I’ll have to try an older firefox to see how it compares.

Other than that – the machine is faster overall, although that is mostly because I am now running much leaner. No session manager (never wanted/used it), no crapplets (i do miss some), no file manager (no loss at all for me), blackbox window manager (never tried it before – it works, although i patched it to re-order the window decorations not to mirror windows 95). I can actually start openoffice (not that i ever need it) and firefox and emacs and a few shells and it still isn’t swapping! And updatedb running in the background doesn’t bring the machine to its knees any more – actually now i think about it, it was something I rarely noticed until I started using ubuntu. My usb drive even mounts – although it takes a long time and you get a lot of errors in syslog.

It literally feels like a different machine now. It even seems to boot faster.

I had a few install issues though. Setting up xdm was a bit of a hassle – the default configuration is broken, at login you get no access control, a clock and a twm with no way to run anything. I had to add “DisplayManager.authDir: /var/xdm” to xdm-config to fix the access control issue. I couldn’t work out the selinux stuff (or is it pam?) to get it to run an xterm on startup from the default fallback Xsession (no permission to open a pty), or execute my custom .xsession (permission denied), so I just disabled it and things got going (I am not a sysadmin any more and don’t have the patience to read up on all this stuff). The thinkpad suspend buttons do nothing – but then I haven’t used them for so long I don’t know if they worked in ubuntu either. I finally found “acpitool -s” will suspend and added a menu to blackbox for that (and suspending is really fast and so far reliable). I’m using autofs to mount media automatically – file manager windows (or worse – e.g. a dvd player that cannot play dvds) popping up while I am typing are a thing of the past (at least on linux – windows still does that even though i told it not to – why can’t they just silently add an icon to your desktop?), although autofs isn’t quite what I want either, it will do for now and I may well just get used to it. Not running gnome-setting-daemon means all your gtk apps take on the crappy default theme (ugh, curved scrollbars?), so I rediscovered .gtkrc-2.0 and hardcoded something reasonable and some smaller/nicer fonts (industrial & vera sans 9). I tried a couple of window managers till I settled on blackbox. It manages windows and virtual desktops with configurable keys and that is all anyone needs, about all I didn’t like was the location of the close button and I fixed that with a patch – Free Software rulez etc etc.

As to the install itself – I tried manually selecting packages this time. Big mistake. About 70% of the way though it asked for ‘Disk 1’. Hmm, but I only had the 1 DVD and wasn’t about to burn every CD as well. Oh well, reset and start again – only an hour or two of meticulous package selection and installation down the drain. So I restarted and took the defaults – only changing / not to use ext3. Yum isn’t bad on this box. It isn’t exactly snappy but it’s fast enough. So I just fiddled with lots of packages afterwards and did a full update (wow, a lot of updates for such a young release). And man pages and info files just work. About time. It didn’t detect my internal wireless (ipw2100 based) but that actually isn’t a bad thing since it never seems to work (i will probably try it though, you never know and all that – i’d prefer not to have a card sticking out the side). It isn’t starting eth0 (plugin roamabout card) at boot up, even though I told it to during the install.

So it wasn’t terribly easy (I cut out a lot above too) but I seem to have what i’m after. Yes, i’ve ended up with a 10 year old ‘linux desktop’ with a faster kernel and better emacs, but this machine is a tool that I use, not one which is using me. I’m sick of clicking away notifications and popups I didn’t ask for in the first place for things the computer should be deciding for itself.

And I think it’s just great you can still do this on a GNU system – install the latest and greatest, but without the unnecessary bells and whistles too.