[tlug] FC5 Sucks: firewire drive/videos

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

I've had no end of trouble since upgrading to Fedora Core 5 from version
4. The usual "dozen things break and need to be reconfigured" I won't go
into as that is all part of any upgrade. But there are two things that
just won't tow the line even after a good hard reconfiguring.

First I cannot play an AVI. Even home video that was made with ffmpeg
using FC4. I can play DVDs. Yes, I've followed all the instructions in
fedorafaq.org.

Second, and much more frustrating is the system locks on boot, after or
during the udev stage. Sometimes. There is a massive bug report thread
on Fedora's bugzilla, so I'm not the only one. (Incidentally the FC5
rescue disk locks in the same way; I have to use the FC4 rescue disk!)

The cure, in my case, was to move things out of /etc/udev/rules.d until
it would boot. I had to move out 10-wacom.rules, 51-hotplug.rules, and
60-net.rules.

Then this evening, I switched on my firewire DVD burner. No auto-detect
as usual: even in previous versions of fedora I've always needed to
reboot to get it to detect. But now it triggers the above udev lock-up.
Switch it off and it boots fine. Switch it on just after udev has
started up and it boots fine but the drive isn't detected.

I guess this is related to have removed the hotplug.rules?

Q1: is there a way to tell linux/fedora to notice my drive, without
rebooting?

Q2: Do other distributions have these udev problems? I.e. is it the
kernel's fault, or Fedora's fault? Is anyone using FC6 and finding it
better than FC5 (in the "stability/things actually work" sense, not the
"cool new features" sense)?

Q3: Which distributions work well for multimedia, out of the box? I.e.
you can play just about any media format you find on the web, without
having to recompile things or tweak obscure configuration files, or hunt
for codecs.

Darren