Just a quick summary of my 11.1 experience on my workhorse.
New install on new machine, x86_64 dual core Athlon, 4GB RAM, 2x750GB SATA disks in software RAID-1. EXT3 and XFS filesystems.
Installed from DVD. No drama, although I had to run through some hoops to get the installer to accept the disks which had already been partitioned, RAIDed, and /home already had some data on it from a test install of 11.0
I run quite a few services on my machine: postfix, dovecot, apache2, mysql, squid, nfs, samba, ldap, dhcp, tftp; so I took some time to transfer the configurations from the old machine and get the services up and running first.
Copying the GBs of data from old machine over a tar/netcat connection (didn’t want the overhead of ssh) took a few hours so I did that overnight (I have Gb NICs but no Gb switch). Rsync took care of the last minute diffs.
No issues with video card, I chose a model which had been on the market for some time (Radeon 2400). In any case, I don’t need fancy video as I’m usually in front of a thin-client anyway.
Sound was a bit trickier. The documentation was the main problem. I thought I needed an alc889a driver and spent some time looking for it, but finally realised from the ALSA docs that snd-intel-hda was the right one, just needed a couple of module options. Better documentation on the model= option would be good. After fiddling with the sliders and the very useful speaker-test ALSA util, got that to work.
Flashplayer just worked. Though I note I’m still using 32-bit flash plugin with nspluginwrapper. Should try the 64-bit one sometime.
Restricted formats worked after I installed the extra software from the third-party repos.
Esound to my thin client worked after I installed libxine1-esd.
Had the DVD device ownership problem like everyone else.
A couple of troubling freezes, but maybe it was because I was fiddling with the network cables and KVM cables. So far it’s been running solidly for 12 hours.
Boy those Mozilla apps are memory hungry. Firefox and Thunderbird have virtual footprints of 500MB each. Resident footprint is more like 100MB each. Always has been so, wonder what that’s all about, should research.
Webserver, PHP, Rails, seem fine. Haven’t execised SMB much. Not likely to do much with GUI file management, prefer the CLI for that.
Found that some packages, like cacti, are not in the main repos any more and need to be located using the build service. A trend?
KDE4 improved. Finally it remembers that I had more than one Konsole window open in the previous session.
Generally satisfied, about the level of hassle I expect to have from a new release, but I can understand that some people have had less than satisfactory experiences.
But I still haven’t figured out how to sort desktop icons by name.