I found out the other day that GNOME can't handle multiple GNOME sessions open at one time for the same user. I was setting up the x86_64 box downstairs. I run NIS with an NFS shared home so that I'm not creating users over the handful of machines at home, and having to worry about maintaining UID/GID's the same.

So anyway, I load out the new box with FC3, configure NIS and NFS, and log in to a GNOME session. Then I start noticing that there are all sort of little problems....the panel doesn't work right, etc. I was dumbfounded. So I start doing research and find out that GNOME can't support sessions for the same user in more than one place. This, to me, is a huge oversight. I ended up turning off NIS/NFS on my downstairs box and creating a user with the same ID and a separate home directory.

I still don't have a solution that I'm particularly happy with for Linux these days. Fedora is OK....FC2 I really don't mind much at all. But there seem to be a lot of decisions being made for the the community by RedHat developers. One of the ones that really chafed at me was decision to drop gqview as a regular package for Fedora. The alternatives that I've seen, nautilus, or eye of GNOME, or whatever Redhat is proposing are totally lame. I used gqview every day when I was doing a lot of photography and really liked the program. Now, it's not that big a deal to recompile gqview and go about my business, but the real issue here was that myself and plenty of other users on the list for this "community supported" distro wanted that program left intact, and were told "tough." I recognize the fact that they're trying to keep the number of packages they have to support down, but lets face it; Fedora is already at 5 CD's worth of junk. I never felt particularly left out in the RedHat 6.2 days where it was all on 1 CD.

Another bitch....whoever decided to change the default desktop layout for GNOME in FC3 and later should be shot. It wouldn't be any big deal, or so I thought. I always keep my home directories on a separate partition, and I figured the existing GNOME configs in them would keep my desktop consistent. However, when I went to FC3 and fired up GNOME...it completely munged my existing config, resulting in an almost unusable desktop. I tried restoring my old configs from backups, but I could never get it to behave in the way I truly wanted it to. I don't understand why that should have been so difficult.

What I really want is something like RedHat 6.2, with modern versions of the packages, a new kernel, and openssh. If something like this exists, please point me to it. If not, I think it's about time I gave back to the community and took a stab at building it myself.