Christopher Blizzard

So FC5 is finally out. Rejoice! I’ve been running it on my laptop now for a while and I’m incredibly happy with it. There are a few notables in this release:

o NetworkManager works really, really well for me. I complained about problems with the airo before, but the problems I was seeing seemed to have been resolved. At work for some reason it takes a while to re-scan after coming back from a suspend but it does eventually pick things up. When I’m ready to go home I can suspend, drive home, unsuspend and it connects immediately to my local wireless. No lines, no waiting.

o I’ve started using the NetworkManager-vpn package to connect to the corporate vpn. Fire up the UI, set up some keys, type in your password and you’re done. It just works. We still need better re-key support, but the patches are out there and it’s only a matter of time before we do releases that support that. This has changed my world. No more ssh tunnels.

o This is the first release where suspend, resume and hibernate work out of the box. It’s incredibly reliable. I’ve had one crash on resume in the last couple of weeks where the video got screwed up and then the machine ate itself, but that’s a pretty good reliability record compared to where I was even a month ago. We made a strong last minute push to make suspend/resume work with a bunch of different kinds of laptops and video cards and made a huge amount of progress. (For the record, I’m still using an x31.) It’s good enough where I expect it to work.