VectorLinux 6.0 SOHO Alpha2 bugs and discussion go here

[vector]

Please post SOHO Alpha2 bugs here, We have other tools to help such as our bug tracker system. Hopefully another developer will put up links and some info.........(I'm tired...........lol).
 

[M0E-lnx]

As vector said in his post, we now have a full blown bug tracker system, so I'd like everyone to post all issues related to the installation process here

http://vlcore.vectorlinux.com/trac/vinstall

You are required to sign up for an account to help keep spammers out, so I would encourage all of our testers to sign up there and begin reporting bugs officially.
This type of tool will help us manage our limited developer efforts and keep us from double posting.

[sparkyhall]

Has failed to install so far using either GUI or text installers, have posted a couple of bug reports on trac although it's my first attempt at using trac so I may have done it wrong.

Should we be posting on trac now or do you want issues reported here?

[rbistolfi]

Has failed to install so far using either GUI or text installers, have posted a couple of bug reports on trac although it's my first attempt at using trac so I may have done it wrong.

Should we be posting on trac now or do you want issues reported here?

Thanks sparkyhall.
I would say that the bugtracker is the best place for bug posting. We will be monitoring this thread however, and I will feed the bugtracking system based in bugs reported here if needed. The reason is that the bugtracker seems to boost development but in my experience, not everybody will want to register and post bugs.

[M0E-lnx]

I did notice the bug report. You really cant do it wrong. The web interface is quite easy to use. I do appreciate you filing offici bug reports. I think the vector team has been long overdue for this.
I know most people do not want to register for yet another account online, but i think its a small price to pay considering the benefits of using such a tool. Besides, think of it like this: by signing up you become part of the official beta tester group

[TLM]

Am on VL6 SOHO Alpha2 right now!!   

My observations:

The standard installer (the one you type "linux" (no quotes) to get kernel panicked. I was trying it because the graphical installer always left me with a black monitor in VL6 Gold. HOWEVER, after the text installer failed in this SOHO, I gave the GUI installer a try, and it works now!! Kudos; there must have been some improvements to the GUI installer.

Installation failed to load the proprietary NVIDIA driver. There was some error message about tree and kernel source. Wish I had written it down. BUT, I ran VASMCC after the install and redone my Xwindow, and this time it sucessfully loaded the NVIDIA driver and it is working fine 

Also many of the desktop effects are working now, such as exploding windows and fall apart windows, etc. I have VL6 Gold on another partition and I had upgraded it to KDE 4.22, and none of the effects worked, so the KDE 432 in SOHO is much improved.

LILO. I have always used LILO with good results, however it was nice to see the option for GRUB in the GUI installer as well. Something went awry with my initial installation and I had no network card and no sound card. However after reinstalling LILO from my VL 6 Gold Disk, my sound and network in SOHO now work. Yay 

WICD. Had to manually enter the text "eth0" no quotes in the Wired Interface under Preferences in WICD to get it to see my connection so I could connect. Don't recall ever having to do that in WICD before; could be an issue for Linux newbies (I'm fairly newbie myself, but learning quickly, 'cause Linux rules and is fun learning!)

I like the Add to Desktop feature when you right-click on a menu item; easier than dragging it to the desktop, but is there a way to get that feature to create a link and not a widget? KDE3 has this down, would like to see similiar functionality in KDE4.

Problem with custom sounds in KDE4: Here is problem I have noticed in every distro that has any version of KDE4. Ever since I found the Knoppix sounds in VL6 Light (the "initializing" wavs) I have ported them to other distros of Linux and even to Window$ (don't hate me; I'm almost weaned off of Redmond software) 
Anyway, whenever I set the "initializing shutdown sequence" wav sound for KDE exiting, it always clips it off after the first syllable; won't play the whole thing. Have not yet tried converting the sound to ogg, however the wavs work perfect in KDE3 without clipping or truncating. Might be a KDE4 issue in general; I will post it to their site as well.

Well, in recap, it took some 2nd tries on some of the configuration, but this SOHO is up and running at least BETA quality, even though it wears the Alpha label. It seems stable, web surfing works great. Have to manually browse to usr/bin/okular to get Firefox to open PDFs without saving them. Can't wait for the final SOHO release. The SOHO's are always my favorites.

Test Machine Specs:
BioStar K8 VGA-M Motherboard
AMD Athlon 3400+ cpu
2 gig PC3200 DDR
250 gig Seagate SATA drive
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 AGP

[M0E-lnx]

The GUI installer has indeed had many improvements. This is release has a lot of features that were not present in the 6.0STD release. The gui installer is essentially the same concept, but has been reworked with a few visual changes and many performance improvements.
As TLM mentioned, Grub is now available for installation, and is pre-selected as the default choice of bootloader. LILO is still available of course.

[stretchedthin]

Awesome job.

Just a couple comments so far.
1.  When I install on Virtualbox I can't run the vxconf section of the installer.  I get a blank screen that just hangs.
2.  If I choose vesa as the driver option for X it fails epically.  The kde4.X desktop environment turns itself off shortly after starting up.
3.  In the keyboard selection part of the installer can it be noted which option will enable the use of 'windows' key or 'super' key. And if such an option does not exist can it be added.
4. Grub install does not seem to allow me to change boot order or labels.

I just did my first grub install, but either failed to select an option to boot into text mode or there is none.  I'm trying again now to check for that again.

again, really awesome.  Love the Grub addition...
Ken 

[M0E-lnx]

@ Stretchedthin:
Your vbox issue can be solved by using the fbdev option rather than vesa or vxconf.
The hardware virtualization is not allowing the probes I guess, so It fails otherwise. I've been using the fbdev option and it works much better. If you really want full blown video, you need to install vbox additions.

Your comment 3:
I'm not sure this is possible. The layout options come straight from the x.org package... We are only offering what they have available.
Your comment 4:
Grub is not as flexible as LILO, so this means that the OS labels, and boot order cannot be altered at this point due to design limitations on GRUB2 itself.

[stretchedthin]

Your vbox issue can be solved by using the fbdev option rather than vesa or vxconf.

Yes that works.   Then guess what I did.  I ran vxconf from the terminal, just to see if it would fail.  It didn't, but it did switch the driver
to vesa and once again I couldn't successfully boot.
It sounds like it is not possible but a tui type boot option sure would be nice on the Grub set-up.  Really not priority as these problems are
limited only to my vbox installs.

[TLM]

CUSTOM SYSTEM SOUNDS IN KDE4 SOLVED!!! 

I had mentioned in a previous posting that KDE4 would not play my custom system notification sounds. I had imported the "initiating shutdown sequence" etc sounds to my usr/share/sounds folder. Then in System Settings under System notifications after selecting KDE System Notifications from the drop down menu, I had attempted to set these sounds for exiting KDE. I had successfully done this in KDE3 in several distros of Linux. However KDE4 clipped off the sounds after only a tiny bit of it was played. I have found that I had to go to the Player Settings tab within System Notifications and select "Use an External Player" I then entered usr/bin/mplayer in the box and clicked Apply. Now my custom sounds work great, both OGG and WAV formats. In KDE3, the KDE Sound System option worked fine, but in KDE4, you have to select mplayer as your external player as outlined above.

Note that this does not actually cause the mplayer GUI to launch, it just plays the sounds like you would want it to for login, logout, shutdown, etc.

Is there a Howto section where I could post this elsewhere in the forum?

[sparkyhall]

Finaly figured out that the reason I have been unable to install VL6.0 SOHO is because I have a EXT4 partition on the drive that I am trying to install to. Removing the EXT4 partition prior to installation resolves the problem. I have updated trac but thought I should post here for those that do not use trac.

Note: I am not trying to install VL6 SOHO on an EXT4 partition, I simply have another EXT4 partition on the same drive.

Chris

[stretchedthin]

(Posted ticket to vlcore)
This is from a test install on my Toshiba p100 laptop(centino duo + nvidia GO 7300)

Did a test install as ext4 one time as lilo one time as grub. In both cases I the VL-standard partition on the drive was detected and I could boot but X would not launch.

It was only a matter of either re-running vxconf to get it going again, but I'm curious as to why this would be the case.

[stretchedthin]

(have not posted as ticket to vlcore)
When soho a2 is installed to dualboot with VL-standard and vliloconf is ran from within vl-standard the vliloconf does not see the soho partition at all.  It only offers to set up the partition that standard is on. 

Edit...
Discovered this is due to vliloconf not seeing ext4 partitions.  Can not even use disk to boot (linux root=/dev/sda1) to a ext4 partition.

[M0E-lnx]

(Posted ticket to vlcore)
This is from a test install on my Toshiba p100 laptop(centino duo + nvidia GO 7300)

Did a test install as ext4 one time as lilo one time as grub. In both cases I the VL-standard partition on the drive was detected and I could boot but X would not launch.

It was only a matter of either re-running vxconf to get it going again, but I'm curious as to why this would be the case.

To get this clear... Are you saying your old VL-Standard X wont load or the new VL SOHO's X wont load?

The installer does not touch any other install's/distro's xorg.conf.