VECTORLINUX 7.0 RC2.1 Bug Reports

[Penguinista]

Some additional bugs:

Xscreensaver:

Even though I've turned off Xscreensaver, the lock screen appears at random.

USB Mouse:

Periodically and at random, my USB mouse stops working and I have to reboot to get control of it again.

[sledgehammer]

I posted this earlier in the wrong thread. 

I can't get Ghostscript to work (won't open .ps files).  Tried different versions.  Error:  "Failed to execute child process 'ghostscript' (no such file or directory)."  Gv works fine.

Any suggestions?

[budulay]

A few of notes on the wifi problems I've been having:

Sometimes after my laptop boots up, wicd won't connect to my University's open wifi - It takes a while and eventually will say that it can't get ip address. Retrying to connect with wicd rarely helps.
Also if while wicd is trying to connect to a network I cancel it, the next time I refresh the network list it will be empty. If I turned my wifi card off(there is a button to do that on my laptop) and then turn it back on, then I am able to refresh again, but only until the next time I cancel a connection.

Most of the time connecting through command line gets the job done. To do that I run following as root:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/bash
iwconfig wlan0 essid MYESSID
iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 channel Auto
iwconfig wlan0 ap any
dhcpcd -t 25 -d wlan0

However, that fails every one in a while, since for whatever reason iwlist wlan0 scan does not return anything(maybe a problem with my card's module?). Then I have to restart wlan0 in ifconfig:

Code:

ifconfig wlann0 down
ifconfig wlan0 up

and try dhcpcd again.
Doing that gets the wifi going.

[sledgehammer]

Also, epdfviewer does not render the page properly.  xpdf does a much better job.

[pierce.jason]

What wireless device do you have? Sounds similar to some issues I've had recently with ralink usb devices (rt2x00 drivers).

A few of notes on the wifi problems I've been having:

Sometimes after my laptop boots up, wicd won't connect to my University's open wifi - It takes a while and eventually will say that it can't get ip address. Retrying to connect with wicd rarely helps.
Also if while wicd is trying to connect to a network I cancel it, the next time I refresh the network list it will be empty. If I turned my wifi card off(there is a button to do that on my laptop) and then turn it back on, then I am able to refresh again, but only until the next time I cancel a connection.

Most of the time connecting through command line gets the job done. To do that I run following as root:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/bash
iwconfig wlan0 essid MYESSID
iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 channel Auto
iwconfig wlan0 ap any
dhcpcd -t 25 -d wlan0

However, that fails every one in a while, since for whatever reason iwlist wlan0 scan does not return anything(maybe a problem with my card's module?). Then I have to restart wlan0 in ifconfig:

Code:

ifconfig wlann0 down
ifconfig wlan0 up

and try dhcpcd again.
Doing that gets the wifi going.

[budulay]

The card is GIGABYTE AirCruiser N300, it's a laptop pci-e card and it uses a rt2860 driver. I also have  a Sabrent pci-e card on my desktop that uses the same driver, and every once in a while(happened twice since I installed RC2.1) it won't return any scans as well. So far a simple restart was able to fix that.

[pierce.jason]

That issue goes away for me when using older kernels, but haven't had the chance to track down what version it creeped up in. I don't think I've tried it in 3.0.4 yet, might be worth a shot for you.

Sad thing, ralink used to be some of the best drivers for linux and wifi.

[budulay]

I did try it with 3.0.4 and still getting a pretty similar behavior 

[Penguinista]

FWIW, I downloaded LibreOffice 3 using Gslapt and it often gives a "General Error" message at random.

[sledgehammer]

Penguinista

I'm not sure how it happened, but my VL 7 RC2.1 has Open Office Light.  It is great!  Only downside is it won't export to pdf, so I use ps2pdf quite often.

John

[sledgehammer]

"open terminal here" in Thunar does not work.

[scififry]

Installed on oldy ThinkPad R40 and it's working fine so far... 

VLQuikPicks is really great and useful...getting apps spontaneously using it is really fun!

Only bug-related thing I noticed: I can't configure my printer, which is an old dot-matrix printer connected directly to the laptop's parallel port.
When entering URIs like /dev/lp0 or /dev/parport0 into the device URI line in the Printer configuring application the Forward button stays greyed out, and with the CUPS browser configurator it won't work at all even to select the interface the printer is connected to.

[sledgehammer]

As earlier noted, I haven't been able to get my HP laserjet 6 to work on the usb port (only port available on my laptop).  However it works on parallel port on an office machine running a new(er) version of slackware.  I think this is due to a change in cups in one of the new versions of slackware, and likely has nothing to do with Vector.  However, the usb port did work fine on my laptop until I switched to VL 7. 

[pierce.jason]

As earlier noted, I haven't been able to get my HP laserjet 6 to work on the usb port (only port available on my laptop).  However it works on parallel port on an office machine running a new(er) version of slackware.  I think this is due to a change in cups in one of the new versions of slackware, and likely has nothing to do with Vector.  However, the usb port did work fine on my laptop until I switched to VL 7. 

What version of hplip does slapt-get say you are using? A few different versions have floated through testing, but I think it turned out that 3.10.x was the most usable for many HP users. 3.11 was in the repo at one time but has subsequently pulled out and moved to "unstable".

[scififry]

Got some new hard drives today for even more Linux and testing of VectorLinux

Tried first on my little Athlon XP box (1,3 GHz, 512 MB RAM). Partitioning using GParted within the graphical installer worked fine, but the installer (and the entire system) froze up after 4% process of installation. Retried two times, but the second time it froze up at 1% and the third time at 3%.
I built that computer from scratch out of a few parts I got gifted and some parts from a broken computer, but it's working fine (ran it a lot using live-CDs (including VL Light Alpha 5 ) and ran Memtest 86+ successfully.
Will retry installation using the text installer later.

Second try was an older PC (AMD Duron 697 MHz, 384 MB RAM) I added a second HD to install Linux (had only W98SE for playing old games), the installation (graphical installer) worked fine, after my first impressions I can say that it's working pretty stable.

EDIT: Tried the text installer on the small Athlon XP box, it installs further than the gui installer (about 15%) but freezes up too ; took a photo of the output.

EDIT2: Because installing VL 7.0 RC2.1 didn't work I tried to install VL Light 7.0 Alpha 5, the installer crashed right before even installing any package.
This computer is really odd. Mayhaps it hates Linux.
*scififry commits one of the biggest crimes imginable in this community: **grabs through lots of old CDs** installing WXP sp1 just to try if anything is installable onto this computer.
--
It worked. I'm so ashamed.
But I think it's a kernel problem, right?