S-ATA, display refresh rate problems and some feedback

[Daniel Borgmann]

Hello!

I'm using a S-ATA disk drive and a regular ATA CD ROM/Burner in combined
mode. When I tried installing Warty, it couldn't detect my CD ROM and
asked me to install the necessary driver from a floppy or selecting it
manually, which didn't help me. This happened both with my new CD Burner
and with my old CD ROM. When I changed my BIOS settings for S-ATA to
disabled, the CD ROM was happily found, so it must have something to do
with this. I ended up installing on some old P-ATA drive which worked
very well. Hopefully this problem can be eliminated for the final
release, please tell me if there is any other information which could be
useful to solve it. My relevant hardware is:
Abit IC7 motherboard with i875P chipset
Some Seagate Barracuda S-ATA disk drive
LG GCE-8525B CD Burner (but that one shouldn't matter)


Next problem: During installation of the Xserver, debconf asked me to
select a set of resolutions to make the highest one of them the default.
Daniel Stone told me that this would be a bug. Also my frequency ranges
in the XF86Config-4 were set much too low, so I had to edit it manually
to avoid horrid flickering. Both seems to suggest that my monitor wasn't
properly detected, which makes sense, because it's also not detected by
Fedora. In Fedora, it offers me a list of monitors to chose from and
weirdly, it contains a lot of very similar monitor types, but never my
exact model. The Fedora list has been the same since Red Hat 8.
My monitor is a "SAMSUNG SyncMaster 950p+" (it's not a very old or no-
name monitor) and the suggested frequency ranges for it are:
H: 30 - 110kHz
V: 50 - 160Hz
Hopefully some day it will be configured automatically. :)
(My graphics card is a Geforce 4 Ti4600, but this one was found and
configured correctly)


Apart from those and a few other minor issues, I'm extremely happy so
far. I'd like to add some thoughts about the desktop configuration.
While I love how all the items are available from the desktop menu (and
the Trash on the panel), I think it would work a lot better if it would
be easy to drag and drop any menu item on the panel or the desktop, just
like application launchers. This is probably obvious, but I skimmed a
few discussions about it and didn't see it mentioned. If the drag and
drop would work, then it would make sense to keep all the items in the
menu. Those who like to have items on their desktop could easily create
them there. At the same time, it should then not be unreasonable to
place a few locations on the desktop by default (similar to how a few
launchers are placed on the panel by default), as those who don't want
them could easily remove them without "losing" those locations and
without retreating to gconf hackery. Additionally, this would allow the
individual applets to be removed, so the applet list would become a lot
simpler. I had some more thoughts, but this should suffice for now. :)

Well, that was a lie. One more thing (probably a GNOME issue): When I
use the "Connect to Server" functionality, an icon for this connection
appears permanently in the Network location. I couldn't find any way to
edit the connection properties of this connection and much worse, I
couldn't find a way to remove this icon again. :) Is there a way?
Also when I chose "Connect To This Server" from the context menu of a
connection icon, it simply creates a duplicate of the specific icon
(which I can't get rid of either). I'm not sure what this is good for,
but it probably needs a little tweakage. :)

Daniel