The Upgrade to Fedora Core 3 Is Not Going Well
I upgraded from Fedora 1 to Fedora 3 rather than doing a clean install. I did this to save myself some work. I wanted to preserve my configurations of postfix, smb mounts, X, windows fonts, my hosts file with my local network definitions, my static IP assignment, ntp configuration.
The upgrade has not gone smoothly. Sound is no longer working. I am having problem with gnome-terminal and mutt. Surprisingly this is the biggest annoyance. I am used to mutt and when it does not work right I get annoyed. I have grown fond of gnome-terminal. It looks better than an xterm. The multiple tabs are quite convenient. The problem seems to be a curses problem. The screen does not clear correctly when changing modes, such as from message index to message display. A screen refresh usually fixes it.
I switched to KDE to see if konsole worked better. It did but I found other problems. For reasons that I do not understand Firefox's fonts looked terrible under KDE. They looked like they were not antialiased. This surprised me since I did not think that was a function of the desktop.
I tried using an xterm instead but I had font problems there. I wanted to use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono at 14 pt. I went to xfontsel so I could create a font string to put in my .Xdefaults file. Xfontsel only showed the 12 pt version even though I was using the 14 pt version in gnome-terminal and konsole without problem. After searching for other acceptable fonts the entire computer locked up, and I had to reboot. This was reproducible. I have stopped using xfontsel. I never got xterm or rxvt configured to my liking. I had used both of these for years before I started gnome-terminal.
I moved from Mandrake to Redhat 9.0 when I had a bad upgrade experience. It looks like it is time to search for something new. I have heard good things about Ubuntu.