LaslowNET Technical Rants, HOWTOs, and Writing

MSI Wind/Fedora 12 Beta – Still Pulsing (Updated)

I like bleeding-edge technology. The newer, the better, as there are usually fun little things to discover and rarely does anything bleeding-edge actually work perfectly, giving me ample opportunity to mess around with things.

Enter Fedora 12. I've played with the initial Alpha release, several of the Snap releases, and as of this morning, the Beta release. So far, at least as far as my MSI Wind 123 goes, they're all unusable.

The biggest problem so far is the display - as soon as GDM kicks in, prior to the login screen loading, the screen starts to 'pulse'. To be more specific, if you were to tap the 'Brightness Up' and 'Brightness Down' keys fairly quickly between two different levels, you'd get the same effect. This continues incessantly, and makes it impossible to use the GUI. If I boot in runlevel 3 (direct-to-console), everything is fine, so the issue is restricted to Xorg.

As far as the beta goes, there's been a little regression. In the Alpha and Snap releases, I was able to get all the way to the desktop, despite the pulsing display. Now, with the beta, it takes just over 2 minutes just to get past the boot animation, and then it stalls before the login screen loads. Whether or not this has anything to do with the fact this is a livecd on a USB stick (made with the Fedora live-usbcreator for Windows, with persistent overlay), I'm not sure. I'll probably download another spin (maybe the KDE version) and see if I have any more luck.

Update: Progess! On a whim, I removed rhgb from the kernel line when booting (press Tab to cancel automatic boot, and then again to edit boot options) and was actually able to get to the desktop, albeit with no improvement to the speed of things. The screen still pulses, however I did notice something interesting: while the screen pulses (briefly before the login screen appears, then it stops until you choose a user, and then it starts again), if I switch to another terminal (CTRL+ALT+F2, for example), the login name starts to fill with "^@" repeated several times, and then stops. If I then switch back to the GDM terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1), the pulsing stops.

At least that gives me something to go on.