VectorLinux-SOHO6-beta2 bug reports and comments

[vector]

Please post bugs and comments on our latest beta2 release here.

Thanks,
Vector

[toothandnail]

Install was fine ( I discovered the new beta while doing some rego maintenance, so I got a bit of a head start...)

Unfortunately, almost all the bugs I reported in beta 1.8 are still there. The startup sequence in Konsole now works without the doubling up of messages. However, the following are still there:

1 Desktop is unstable. Even with 'align icons to grid' and 'lock icons in place' selected, the desktop icons gradually migrate up the desktop.

2 Open Office extension manager is still broken. Any attempt to add an extension ends before it starts, with the following error:

Code:

Add extention(s)
The operation on file /usr/lib/ooo-3.1/share/extention/install/dict-en.ost
was started with an invalid parameter.

3 Fonts and menu entries for GTK apps are not adjustable, even using the System Settings for GTK styles. As an example, fonts used in the Seamonkey menu are oversized and will not adjust to a more reasonable size. This seems to be partially due to font selection (changing the font makes a bit of a difference to the appearance of the menus), but not much. Even with the smallest available (6pt!) font size selected, the fonts are still too large in the Seamonkey and Firefox menus.

4 If the KDE user manager is used to create a new user, it defaults to using a UID of 500. While this can be changed, the user needs to know that it should be changed. The applet does not appear to read existing user records, so it does not increment from any existing users.

5 VasmCC appears twice in the menu - once under settings and once under system.

6 In System Settings > Advanced > Samba, there is no option to enter the root password, so all options are grayed out unless you are logged in as root.

7 Even though /etc/samba/smb.conf has been edited to show the correct workgroup, a phantom 'MYGROUP' is still being shown, even though the correct workgroup is also shown.

8 System Settings > Network Settings comes up with a 'your platform is not supported' box, offering lots of options. Would be nice to know what should be selected.

9 System Settings > Date & Time. Locale settings can be set by either user or root, but always request the root password? Seems inconsistent if the setting is local rather than global (which is implied by the fact that it can be set by individual users). Worse, the settings don't stick - if System Settings is closed and reopened, the locale setting will have reverted to the original value.

10 The ~/.bash_profile is created with 'export LANG=en_US'. This is not the locale selected during install, and should be. In both cases, the 'preserve locale settings' (sorry, can't remember the exact wording) option was ticked during the install.

11 Keyboard layout is now correct in X, but is not correct in console. Even though I selected UK English during the install, and UK English is active in X, in console, I am getting US English layout.

12 I'm getting an odd error when logging in to a console session. As below:

Code:

redmond:$ cat error.txt
Password:
Vector Linux 6.0 SOHO Beta 2 built on DEC-02-2009 on Linux 2.6.31.6
Last login: Mon Dec  7 00:17:11 +0000 2009 on :0.
No mail.
You are working as redmond
Frequently used programs:
Configuration  : vasm
File manager   : mc (press F2 for useful menu)
Editor         : mcedit, nano, vi
Multimedia     : alsamixer, play
Cannot open display "default display"

One big improvement is Dolphin. In beta 1.8, any time I attempted to access a Samba share, it died instantly. In this beta, I'm able to access Samba shares without it collapsing.

More later. Now I have to go and reinstall VL 6.0 Standard - installing Xfce4 has made my existing install very unstable.....

paul.

[Daniel]

6 In System Settings > Advanced > Samba, there is no option to enter the root password, so all options are grayed out unless you are logged in as root.

This was a problem in 5.9.1 SOHO as well. The "administrator mode" button is not visible from System Settings but it is visible when opening that screen from the Control Center.

[toothandnail]

6 In System Settings > Advanced > Samba, there is no option to enter the root password, so all options are grayed out unless you are logged in as root.

This was a problem in 5.9.1 SOHO as well. The "administrator mode" button is not visible from System Settings but it is visible when opening that screen from the Control Center.

I'm confused ( not an unusual state, I fear). By Control Center do you mean VasmCC? If so, certainly, SWAT is available to set Samba, but that's not the same thing as having the KDE Samba applet working.

paul.

[GrannyGeek]

I downloaded both ISOs and burned the CDs with K3B.  The bad news--the CD won't boot on the Celeron desktop, which is my testing computer. The checksum was fine, the CD burned successfully, and it boots on another computer. By the way, when the first CD didn't boot, I burned another one on what I think is better media. When that failed to boot, I burned another CD at the slowest speed available. The DVD burner is just a few months old and does not seem to have problems.

Is there a working text installer yet? I could use vinstall if a text installer has made it into this beta.

Several test versions of VL prior to SOHO a number of us reported a problem where a Vector ISO would not boot. It was traced to some combination of BIOS, chipset (VIA?), and hardware, I think, and something in the format of the ISO was changed. That fixed the problem for those of us who had the problem. Could this problem have crept back into this ISO? VL6 SOHO beta 1.6 did boot from the CD.
--GrannyGeek

[Masta]

1 Desktop is unstable. Even with 'align icons to grid' and 'lock icons in place' selected, the desktop icons gradually migrate up the desktop.

I have not seen this. I suspect it might have something to do with the new xorg. Maybe skipping the ".... with no xorg.conf" option and selecting one of the traditional methods might result differently.

3 Fonts and menu entries for GTK apps are not adjustable, even using the System Settings for GTK styles. As an example, fonts used in the Seamonkey menu are oversized and will not adjust to a more reasonable size. This seems to be partially due to font selection (changing the font makes a bit of a difference to the appearance of the menus), but not much. Even with the smallest available (6pt!) font size selected, the fonts are still too large in the Seamonkey and Firefox menus.

Seems related to the above. Check xorg settings. Your system might need to have a xorg.conf.

4 If the KDE user manager is used to create a new user, it defaults to using a UID of 500. While this can be changed, the user needs to know that it should be changed. The applet does not appear to read existing user records, so it does not increment from any existing users.

Upstream bug, but I think we can hack it

5 VasmCC appears twice in the menu - once under settings and once under system.

oops, thanks for catching this one.

9 System Settings > Date & Time. Locale settings can be set by either user or root, but always request the root password? Seems inconsistent if the setting is local rather than global (which is implied by the fact that it can be set by individual users). Worse, the settings don't stick - if System Settings is closed and reopened, the locale setting will have reverted to the original value.

Looks like another upstream bug. This is kept a root function since it will also change the time settings in the hardware with most machines'  bios. Again root password should probably be slipped into this one.

10 The ~/.bash_profile is created with 'export LANG=en_US'. This is not the locale selected during install, and should be. In both cases, the 'preserve locale settings' (sorry, can't remember the exact wording) option was ticked during the install.

Is this from imported user account or newly created?

[vector]

Several test versions of VL prior to SOHO a number of us reported a problem where a Vector ISO would not boot. It was traced to some combination of BIOS, chipset (VIA?), and hardware, I think, and something in the format of the ISO was changed. That fixed the problem for those of us who had the problem. Could this problem have crept back into this ISO? VL6 SOHO beta 1.6 did boot from the CD.

Any of you having boot issues try this:
http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-6.0/iso-test/VL6.0-SOHO-B2.1.iso
It will work with SOHO-B2-CD2.iso so no worries.
This is identical to our original release with a small change to the make iso process.
Those with no boot issues do not need this!

Thanks,
Vec

[toothandnail]

1 Desktop is unstable. Even with 'align icons to grid' and 'lock icons in place' selected, the desktop icons gradually migrate up the desktop.

I have not seen this. I suspect it might have something to do with the new xorg. Maybe skipping the ".... with no xorg.conf" option and selecting one of the traditional methods might result differently.

I am using an xorg.conf. Not sure why, since I'm not on either Zenwalk or Salix, but with the later SOHO betas, if I don't have an xorg.conf, the arrow keys on my keyboard don't work correctly.

I suspect that it is an upstream bug - I like the task bar at the top of the screen, not the bottom. It is still happening - really annoying. And, IMHO, should not exist in a release level product.

3 Fonts and menu entries for GTK apps are not adjustable, even using the System Settings for GTK styles. As an example, fonts used in the Seamonkey menu are oversized and will not adjust to a more reasonable size. This seems to be partially due to font selection (changing the font makes a bit of a difference to the appearance of the menus), but not much. Even with the smallest available (6pt!) font size selected, the fonts are still too large in the Seamonkey and Firefox menus.

Seems related to the above. Check xorg settings. Your system might need to have a xorg.conf.

See above...

I will also note that font changes do take effect, but size changes don't. As a result, all GTK based stuff looks very poor - VasmCC, Seamonkey, Firefox all look wrong.

4 If the KDE user manager is used to create a new user, it defaults to using a UID of 500. While this can be changed, the user needs to know that it should be changed. The applet does not appear to read existing user records, so it does not increment from any existing users.

Upstream bug, but I think we can hack it

Well, either that, or remove the applet. VasmCC has similar functions, so it might be simpler (and more effective) to suppress the KDE applet completely.

5 VasmCC appears twice in the menu - once under settings and once under system.

oops, thanks for catching this one.

No problem - that sort of small detail is real easy to miss....

9 System Settings > Date & Time. Locale settings can be set by either user or root, but always request the root password? Seems inconsistent if the setting is local rather than global (which is implied by the fact that it can be set by individual users). Worse, the settings don't stick - if System Settings is closed and reopened, the locale setting will have reverted to the original value.

Looks like another upstream bug. This is kept a root function since it will also change the time settings in the hardware with most machines'  bios. Again root password should probably be slipped into this one.

It is, but the setting does not stick. For reasons best known to the idiot KDE devs, any time I select 'Europe/London' as a locale during install, it defaults to Gurnsey. KDE has been doing that as long as I can remember...

In older versions, changing it worked. In this version, the stupid thing reverts to its original selection as soon as the dialog is exited. Saving it multiple times doesn't help. The system remain convinced that the locale should be Gurnsey. Personally, I hate computers that think they're smarter than I am.

Oh, just checked. It may be upstream, but it has been fixed in other distros using the new KDE. While KDE still thinks I live in Gurnsey, it does save changes in OpenSUSE and Mandrivia.

10 The ~/.bash_profile is created with 'export LANG=en_US'. This is not the locale selected during install, and should be. In both cases, the 'preserve locale settings' (sorry, can't remember the exact wording) option was ticked during the install.

Is this from imported user account or newly created?

From an imported user - see below:

Code:

# LOCALES ADDITIONS MADE BY THE VL GUI INSTALLER
export LANG=en_US
`setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout gb`
# END OF MODIFICATIONS BY THE VL GUI INSTALLER

Given that I've already selected a UK locale, that really is a bad error.

paul.

[GrannyGeek]

Any of you having boot issues try this:
http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-6.0/iso-test/VL6.0-SOHO-B2.1.iso
It will work with SOHO-B2-CD2.iso so no worries.
This is identical to our original release with a small change to the make iso process.
Those with no boot issues do not need this!

I'm very happy to report that SOHO B2.1 booted fine and installed easily. Thanks!

I should mention that when I burned the B2.1 CD with K3B, I couldn't open the CD as user with a file manager. I got a "Permission denied" instead of a file list. I could see a file list with a file manager as user. I don't recall having that situation with other CDs I've burned. No problems when I booted with the CD, though.
--GrannyGeek

[GrannyGeek]

As I just added to a message above, when I burned the SOHO B2.1 CD with K3B, I couldn't open it with a file manager as user. I had to su to root to open the CD. This was on my VL6 Standard installation, on which I burned the CD. It booted fine, though.

In the System Bootloader Configuration part of the installation, there is no option to put LILO on a floppy disk. So I had to choose "no boot loader" and reboot with the installation CD and run liloconf through VASMCC, which does offer the floppy option. I am fortunate to have a floppy drive on this old computer and I like to boot from a floppy disk while I'm testing an upcoming distro.

VASMCC still lists VPackager in the Utilities section. It seems we're always told that VPackager has been abandoned but people still say they're building packages with VPackager and there's no indication in VASMCC that VPackager is not the way to go. Maybe it should be removed from VASMCC if we shouldn't use it?

I haven't had much chance to do more testing, but everything I tried worked, especially the biggies like video, sound, network.
--GrannyGeek

[TLM]

Yay!! Knemo works in this Beta 2! I had first reported in Alpha 1 that it was in the repos, but did not work in KDE4. Knemo has now been included in the ISO of Beta 2 and works quite fine.

Installation of Beta 2 with the graphical installer went without a hitch. KDE4 4.3.4 seems smoother than ever. Still testing, will report any issues if I have any.

Test Machine Specs:
Biostar K8 VGA-M Motherboard
AMD Athlon 3400+ CPU (Newcastle)
250 gig Seagate SATA laptop drive
2 gig RAM
NVIDIA FX-5200 GPU
15" Vison LCD Flat Panel
Microsoft 3000 Wireless Optical Mouse
Generic 107 Key PS2 Keyboard
LiteOn DVD Burner
Generic Floppy

[stretchedthin]

Here is some points from an install on to one of my laptops.

1. Didn't get a choice on what resolution the installer was going to start on.  I had my screen set to 800x600 ( the resolution I screencapture on.) and at that rez the installer does not show completely.  I will try this later on my aspire one, which has a naturally low rez an see if I have the same problem.

2. I was setting up to dual boot with windows and the installer detected the windows partition without issue. Grub made Windows the Boot Default with no option to change, so I selected Lilo and changed default to Vector.
Happy to report that lilo configured but somehow did not set the bootsplash correctly so all I got was text at first start.

3. Choose vxconf for graphical set up and it detected more than one video card and wanted me to choose from
Intel  Intel (on one line) and
Intel  Intel (on the other)
Can't remember ever having to choose on this laptop before, pretty sure I only have one video card.

4.The whole vxconf set-up was displayed in the upper left corner of the screen, the rest was blank.  Very much like it was showing at 800*600 while the rest of the screen was at 1280*1024

5. Konqueror still is not flash enabled.  I can watch youtube on any other browser but konqueror.  

6. I saw toothandnail had trouble with the openoffice extension manager so I explored a bit.
a) I can verify that I got the same experience he did.
b) Plus I think the link that appears in the lower left "Get more extensions online..." s no longer valid (or just down) as the page would not load.(I don't think you have any control over this)  I went directly to http://extensions.services.openoffice.org, for the extensions I tested with.

7) The firefox and seamonkey download managers have a function "open containing folder" I had to tell it to use /usr/bin/dolphin to actually do what it was supposed to.  I think that Firefox/Seamonkey preferences could be set to make "Dolphin" the default action for file content types.

. Konqueror saw my samba shares no problem. (I record TV with Mythbuntu and like to stream them to other rooms in the house).
a)It would be nice to have vlc, Dragon Player and MPlayer just don't compare to vlc for playing streamed content.
b)I also had a mystery 'Mygroup' show up as a samba share. (see toothandnails comments.) However, I got this to disappear by changing the workgroup name on my machine to the same as my existing samba share. Also, I re-ran vxconf (see below) and chose "no xorg.conf" before I noticed it was gone, but can't see how this is related.

9. I hit ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart X and nothing happened. However, ctrl+alt+backspace worked once I ran vxconf again and chose "no xorg.conf" from the options.

10. vasmCC-->FILESYSTEM-->Backup System does not seem to be working.  If I run a manual backup it says it has stored something to /home/backupsys/backupsys-0.0-0.tar.bz2, but a quick check shows nothing in /home/backupsys.

11. No  wxCam for soho's video camera's, that makes me sad.  I liked wxCam.


I'll test some more on another machine tomorrow evening.

[peispud]

 Thanks for an excellent beta release. I've already posted my thoughts on beta2 on my local Linux forum, so I'll just post the link here http://linuxpei.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=100#100

[peispud]

 I'm just setting up Steam now. I had to use the old msiexec -i command, for some strange reason Steam will not open with " wine ". After install Steam quickly displayed a wine-gecko error and crashed. I had to google a Slackware package for wine-gecko as it's not in the repos. Everything seems to be working now.

[GrannyGeek]

There is something strange going on with user identification when drives are mounted.

On my test computer (the Celeron desktop) I have a total of four VectorLinuxes installed: VL6Light on a small partition for packaging; VL6 Standard Deluxe (my "real" working partition); VL6 Standard Deluxe called vl6bad because Flash doesn't work in Opera for reasons unknown--I tried every possible solution but nothing worked, so I reinstalled VL6 Standard Deluxe into another partition (mentioned above), where everything works as it should; VL6 SOHO b2.1.

For years, I've copied files from the home directory into another. All my VL installations have the same user name and number. This has worked fine and ownership of the files is under the same user name and number on all partitions.

Except on VL6 SOHO beta 2.1. 

When I try to copy a file or directory from ~/ on VL6 Standard to ~/ on VL6 SOHO, I get a permission denied. When I'm in VL6 SOHO and try to copy from VL6 Standard, instead of showing ownership under the same user name, the owner of the files in Standard is called visitor. What's going on? So in order to copy files from Standard's home directory to SOHO's, I have to do it as root and then change ownership for everything I copied. This is also the case when I try doing it the other way--working from Standard to SOHO or SOHO to Standard.

This has *never* happened in all the years I've been using VL on at least three computers at all times. What should be a quick and easy process becomes cumbersome.

Something is amiss. Perhaps this is related to the problem someone reported when adding a user account on another partition to VL6 SOHO.
--GrannyGeek