VL-5.9-STD-BETA2 Bugs/annoyances

[GrannyGeek]

I installed beta 2.4 on my Celeron desktop and my Turion laptop. On the Celeron everything went perfectly (it always does on that computer). I haven't found any problems so far, but I've had it for only a few hours. I'm using the Radeon driver offered by VASM.

Then, the supreme test--installing on the troublesome Turion laptop! First I tried the default kernel, but it stalled at the same place as all the other 32-bit kernels (right after it looks for the floppy drive, which I don't have). So I tried the sata2 kernel and everything went very smoothly, no stalls, no problems. I should also mention that I use Runlevel 2 and don't mess with bootsplashes and graphical logins.

I had the initial configuration go for the proprietary NVIDIA driver and had the screen resolution autoconfigured. It worked perfectly. I'm getting the proper 1280x800 laptop resolution.

Next I tried to set up my WPA wireless, which has been extremely troublesome on earlier betas. On my first attempt at modprobe ndiswrapper I got a FATAL:Module ndiswrapper not found. So I downloaded (with another computer) the library file Uelsk8s posted for the alternative kernel, copied it to the proper place, and this time modprobe ndiswrapper loaded. I then configured wpa_supplicant.conf, ran wpa_supplicant, and--I was connected! I was able to ping my router and my wireless access point. Then I started X and tried to connect with the Internet It didn't work until I ran wifi-radar and set things up for my fixed-IP WPA connection, including the DNS server that I use. So far, so good. In the past, the wireless connection disappeared after some period of time and getting it back was difficult to impossible without a reboot, so I'm anxious to see if this problem persists

My other problem on this laptop is sound. I haven't had time yet to see whether anything will come out of the speakers this time. So far, no distro or LiveCD has been able to actually produce sound.

Everything else has been working fine. Will continue testing and hopefully the Internet connection won't crap out.
--GrannyGeek

[MikeCindi]

Loaded 2.4 and all seemed to go well. Only had 2 and 2.3 for a few days each. 2.3 fixed some problems with flash drive detection only to give an error about not having permission to mount the device. 2.3 lost sound on my Toshiba Satellite A15 laptop for the game chromium only and 2.4 didn't fix that. TuxOnIce (suspend2) while enabled in the kernel doesn't "respect" my resume2=swap:/dev/hda7 line in lilo and it is missing the line "echo 1 > /sys/power/suspend2/do_resume" that should be in the init process before file systems are mounted. I tried placing that line in /etc/rc.d/rc.S as I had done sucessfully with 5.8 SOHO but still no luck. And finally, still no "compact" line in lilo.conf which on my slow 2GHz celeron with 1Gb RAM adds about 7 seconds to the boot time at least twice before I get it fixed. Overall though continues to be very impressive with stability and speed.

[Pita]

BETA-2.4

Did not mention on my last post testing this VL5.9 version Ihad installed with initrd.new and vl-hot-config.

Made a new install with initrd and hal.

All seems to be working properly, CD, Printer, Internet, Frozen-Bubble except, and that is serious:

leaving X, whichever way (logout, exit, Ctrl-Alt-F*/-Backspace) will blank the screen and disable the keyboard requiring a dirty reboot..

For xfce4 to come-up it takes 35 seconds, Fluxbox 15 seconds against 25 and 10 seconds respectively in VL-5.8.

How could that crash of X be fixed?

[uelsk8s]

Pita,
what video card and driver are you using?

[Pita]

Pita,
what video card and driver are you using?

Unquote

On board:
As of xorg.org

Driver      "savage"                                               
VendorName  "S3 Inc."                                         
BoardName   "VT8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266]"
BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"

I just checked xorg.conf in VL5.9* has a vesa driver.
Later I will copy xorg.conf from VL5.8 to VL5.9 and see what will happen.

Hurray, it worked!!
No more X crashes after copying VL5.8 xorc.conf to VL59*
xfce4 comes up in about 15 seconds and fluxbox in about 10.

[exeterdad]

Installed beta 2.4 last night. Used delta to patch (that's so cool) and vinstall-iso script. Click-click-click... Bam.  Hello VL!  Absolutely no hassles.  Good thing the install hasn't changed as I really don't read it any more, I just click 

Can't say I can tell the difference.  I guess that's a good thing as all is/was running well for me.  The numlock button led acts odd, but functions.  If numlock is activated at Kdm greet, it still works, but the led goes out when Xfce is loaded.  If I wait to activate it after Xfce loads, it looks and works normally.

Not having slow loads like others are reporting.  Things are fast all around, even for having it installed on this boat anchor.

Please keep the wallpaper that everyone is complaining about available in future releases.  I happen to enjoy it.  And my wife out of the blue complimented it. She has no interest in my little Linux "hobby", so the compliment is huge coming from her.

[GrannyGeek]

I ran into a problem today on my Celeron desktop. I tried to listen to streaming radio with RealPlayer and it complained that something else was using the sound card. It wasn't. I rebooted so I could be sure there wasn't some process running and I got the same message. On the previous betas I had no problem with RealPlayer. I checked /dev in the previous beta and there were many more entries in /dev/snd and there was a symlink for /dev/dsp, linked to /dev/dsp0. There is no /dev/dsp in the latest beta. It seems to be missing some things needed for programs like RealPlayer that use ALSA's OSS emulation. I'm going to rerun alsaconf tomorrow and maybe reinstall RealPlayer to see if that fixes anything. I'll report my results. The sound is some onboard VIA AC'97.

On my Turion laptop, my WPA wireless has been stable for many hours. So whatever you did to fix it seems to be working (I use the sata2 kernel.) I do have one problem on the laptop with shutting down. When I select ShutDown from XFce's Quit option, X closes and the shutdown process starts, but I then get a screen with random text that repeats randomly. I have to push in the power button in order to shut down the computer. So Shutdown isn't working right on this computer.
--GrannyGeek

[Dweeberkitty]

I installed Beta 2.4 on my little slow Winbook XLi laptop. The installation went fine except for three things:

1. I chose AutoConfig for my X resolution but when I booted up, it was at 800x600 or something ridiculously low like that. I tried to fix it in Vasm but had no luck. No matter what I did it always stayed at a low resolution. I found that the driver used in my xorg.conf was 'trident'. I changed this to vesa and it fixed the resolution. Either something needs to be fixed with that driver setup or it needs to use vesa.

2. My laptop has a touchpad thing. This was not recognized on install and I was forced to plug in an external usb mouse. In the installer, on the screen when it asks what kind of mouse (number of buttons etc) it should have an option for a touchpad and edit the xorg.conf appropriately.

3. Sound does not work. I had to chose to search ISA cards or something like that and it found the card but there is no working sound. I'll see if I can come up with more details than that. 

There were also some problems with suspend and standby and things like that. I need to look more into those things though. It looks really good so far!

[MikeCindi]

I checked /dev in the previous beta and there were many more entries in /dev/snd and there was a symlink for /dev/dsp, linked to /dev/dsp0. There is no /dev/dsp in the latest beta.

This is the reason chromium's sound is broken on my laptop. Repeating the ALSA setup and reloading chromium didn't help me (nor did I expect it to).

[Pita]

There is again a beauty spot, frozen-bubble crashes now after I changed to VL58 xorg.conf.

So I asume it must be in this file, no crash with VL59 xorg.conf, however, leaving X blanks screen and kb hangs.

With VL58 xorg.conf frozen-bubble crashes, however, X can be terminated w/o hang.

How to solve???

Here are the message of frozen-bubble crash:

Backtrace:
0: X(xf86SigHandler+0x80) [0x80ceff0]
1: [0xb7f4b420]
2: /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers//savage_drv.so(SavageSwitchMode+0x9f) [0xb7b6363f]
3: X [0x80f2f21]
4: X [0x80db993]
5: X(xf86SwitchMode+0xd8) [0x80b8758]
6: X(VidModeSwitchMode+0x6b) [0x80d970b]
7: /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions//libextmod.so [0xb7ba829c]
8: X [0x8146d2e]
9: X(Dispatch+0x2cb) [0x808682b]
10: X(main+0x496) [0x806dce6]
11: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xd8) [0xb7ca7df8]
12: X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0x209) [0x806d011]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11.  Server aborting

xfce4-session: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.   

(xfwm4:3520): libxfcegui4-WARNING **: ICE I/O Error

(xfwm4:3520): libxfcegui4-WARNING **: Disconnected from session manager.

(xfdesktop:3524): libxfcegui4-WARNING **: ICE I/O Error

(xfdesktop:3524): libxfcegui4-WARNING **: Disconnected from session manager.

(xfce4-panel:3531): libxfcegui4-WARNING **: ICE I/O Error

(xfce4-panel:3531): libxfcegui4-WARNING **: Disconnected from session manager.
xfce-mcs-manager: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.
xfwm4: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.
Thunar: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.
xfdesktop: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.
xfce4-panel: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.
xterm:  fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) or KillClient on X server ":0.
xfce4-mount-plugin: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.
xfce4-menu-plugin: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.
orageclock: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.
xfce4-netload-plugin: Fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server :0.0.
xinit:  connection to X server lost.
XIO:  fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0.0"
      after 117 requests (113 known processed) with 15 events remaining.

[GrannyGeek]

This is the reason chromium's sound is broken on my laptop. Repeating the ALSA setup and reloading chromium didn't help me (nor did I expect it to).

Very interesting. It sounds like something broke in this version. I guess I won't bother with alsaconf and will just wait for the next beta. I found that the radio stream I wanted to play in RealPlayer did just fine in Audacious, so maybe I don't need RealPlayer at all.
--GrannyGeek

[vector]

sssshhhhhhhhh beta 2.8 is out and about rumor has it this will be our first public rc release. We will announce this Sunday night so there is time if you want to do a final test for us. http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/Uelsk8s/old-pkgs/VL5.9-STD-B2.8.iso
We are looking for show stoppers and maybe some help completing the fluxbox menu. Also test the bugs you encountered before let us know which are ripe and which are dead.  Any last minute suggestions would be welcome too. Thanks for all the input to date.

cheers,
vec

[toothandnail]

Beta 2.8 downloaded and installed. Bugs encountered before:

I'm still getting "xd: out of memory" at the start of the boot. Doesn't seem to affect anything, but might be a bit alarming..

Selected HAL instead of Vl-hot. I'm still getting a "[failed]" message next to "Setting up hald", but, so far at least, HAL seems to be working - I've been able to mount both USB and optical devices without problems.

MC still doesn't understand .lzma packages. I'll install the Vector 5.8 version in a bit...

New problems:

the splash screen has a problem. In the final stage of the install, the blue background overlaps the bottom of the 'terminal' window. Also, during boot, messages continue below the terminal window.

During install, I tried to install the flgx drivers (new option), since the T40 has Radeon graphics. That came up with an error, allowed me to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf with mcedit, but was still not happy. Went round in circles until I elected to remove the flgx driver and replace it with the radeon driver.

Otherwise, everything seems to be working well. More later if I hit any other oddities.

Oh, one other (really) minor item. During partition selection, I select a / partition, then go on to select /home (which is shared with two copies of Zenwalk). The installer offers 'keep" option (no format). That message appears twice, for some reason.

  Nice to see Seamonkey 1.1.5 installed - I'd installed the 5.8 version a couple of days ago...

paul.

[MikeCindi]

2.8 - sound in chromium fixed, compact line added to lilo; still problems with getting suspend2 to work...will check a few other items out over the next 24 hours.

[toothandnail]

  That didn't take long...

I have a number external USB drives, both flash and hard drive. The most recent of these is a Seagate Freeagent Go 120 GB unit. It is NTFS formatted.

Under Vl-hot in the earlier betas, I could access it, and read/write data to it. Using HAL, it mounts, but I can only access it as root, even for reading purposes. I can access another drive, which is FAT32 (haven't tried writing to it yet).

I would guess that is something in a udev rule, but I'm afraid I don't even know where to look..

Can anyone tell me which rule I should be looking at? I'd like any external drive to be full access  for normal users.

One (related) item. When selecting to unmount such a device, it would be nice if there was some way to tell when it has been fully shut down. In the past I've had problems with an external drive formatted HPFS - it frequently doesn't seem to be shut down cleanly when I unmount it.

paul.