VectorLinux5.9-rc2 bugs/annoyances

[exeterdad]

Has anyone tried making a chroot of this release? I extracted all the required bulks, X11 and dev from optional, and no other packages.  I was able to go into chroot fine.  Did ldconfig and fc-config.  But it doesn't seem to connect to network.  Soooo....  slapt-get won't work for packaging. 5.8 would work right out of the box.  Any ideas?  I'd like to get back to packaging with clean chroot ASAP rather than having to do real fresh installs. I need to be able to do non packaging things too. 

Edit: Trying to do a wget download as a test.  Doesn't seem to resolve.  Ping doesn't work either. I dunno 

Edit again: I copied over my /etc/resolve.conf and /etc/hosts and all is well.

[nightflier]

Today I ran ino something strange: I had to click on the "Quit" button four times until the shutdown pop-up would appear....
Anyone else had the same problem?

This has been around since the beta versions:
http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=4506.msg29532#msg29532

[toothandnail]

Today I ran ino something strange: I had to click on the "Quit" button four times until the shutdown pop-up would appear....
Anyone else had the same problem?

That has been mentioned before.. I think its a general Xfce bug. I've had it happen a few times with Vl 5.9, but also had it happen with Zenwalk.

The Zenwalk snapshot that I'm running alongside VL is using Xfce 4.4.2. So far, I've not had the problem with it. Maybe the Xfce devs have finally nailed it.

paul.

[GrannyGeek]

I've stuck with the old version of Opera (9.10) anyway because I don't need or particularly want Speed Dial; its utility is pretty marginal IMO if you don't have broadband.

I'm using Opera 9.24. I LOVE Speed Dial! When I first heard about it, I thought "ho-hum." But as I've used it I've come to consider it something I wouldn't want to be without. It's a nice intermediate spot between tabs you keep open all the time and bookmarks. Since you have to start a new tab anyway if you want to go to a new site, with SpeedDial you just click on the place you want to go. It has a nice thumbnail view of the site, so you even find it fast.

I do have broadband--another thing I don't think I could live without. I would never consider moving anywhere where broadband wasn't available. It would be like living someplace without electricity. Of course, there are places where broadband is rare. Anybody there has my deepest sympathy and I hope that changes rapidly. I'm in a rural area and it's near-miraculous that we've had broadband available for about six years. Our phone company wanted it to be available to 100% of its all-rural base and worked hard at getting the necessary equipment set up.
--GrannyGeek

[GrannyGeek]

I've installed RC2 on my older Celeron laptop, which has Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics. xorg.conf installed the Intel 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device and yesterday everything was working fine.

Today I turned on the computer and XFce came up with the desktop icons invisible, the text nearly invisible, and text and icons on the desktop menu nearly invisible. They appeared to all be a very light gray that barely showed up against any background, light or dark. This happened in both user accounts, though yesterday I had used only one.

I rebooted but that didn't help. Finally, I changed the driver to vesa and everything looks fine now.

What happened? Is there a way to fix this?
--GrannyGeek

[newt]

I've stuck with the old version of Opera (9.10) anyway because I don't need or particularly want Speed Dial; its utility is pretty marginal IMO if you don't have broadband.

I'm using Opera 9.24. I LOVE Speed Dial! When I first heard about it, I thought "ho-hum." But as I've used it I've come to consider it something I wouldn't want to be without. It's a nice intermediate spot between tabs you keep open all the time and bookmarks. Since you have to start a new tab anyway if you want to go to a new site, with SpeedDial you just click on the place you want to go. It has a nice thumbnail view of the site, so you even find it fast.

I, also, have not begun using speeddial, however I do use the latest stable release of Opera.  Granny makes some good points regarding speeddials use - I guess I'll have to give it a whirl.  But I've strayed from my point... point being that if you don't want to use speeddial simply click it away with the "Hide speed dial" option - pretty easy. Screenshot link: http://operawatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/speeddial1.png

[caitlyn]

I'm now running RC2 on my five year old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204, 1GHz Celeron processor, 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD.  There are still two very significant bugs in the installer that I've run across:

1. Installer:  Grub is still a mess.   Every Linux partition not assigned a mount point gets an entry whether or not an OS is installed there.  Worse, if there is an OS there (my system currently has three installed distros) it gets them wrong too and doesn't correctly detect the initrd file.  Even Vector Linux isn't properly labeled!  We'd be better off with just lilo than this result for grub, IMHO.  Here is the relevant portion of the /boot/grub/menu.lst file generated by the installer:

# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Linux on (/dev/hda1)
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 ro vga=791 splash=silent
  initrd /boot/initrd
# Linux bootable partition config ends
# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Linux on (/dev/hda5)
  root (hd0,4)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 ro vga=791 splash=silent
  initrd /boot/initrd
# Linux bootable partition config ends
# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Linux on (/dev/hda6)
  root (hd0,5)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 ro vga=791 splash=silent
  initrd /boot/initrd
# Linux bootable partition config ends
# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Linux on (/dev/hda7)
  root (hd0,6)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7 ro vga=791 splash=silent
  initrd /boot/initrd
# Linux bootable partition config ends

Here is what my working menu.lst looks like:

title         WolvixHunter-1.1.0
root         (hd0,4)
kernel         /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 ro vga=791 splash=silent
initrd         /boot/initrd.splash
savedefault
boot

title         AliXe 0.11b
root         (hd0,5)
kernel         /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 ro vga=791
boot

title         Vector Linux 5.9
root         (hd0,0)
kernel         /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 ro vga=791 splash=silent
initrd         /boot/initrd
boot

I don't expect grub to correctly label other distros besides VL.  I do expect the installer to recognize where a valid distro is and isn't installed and to create a proper menu entry.  Most other distros do this just fine.

2.  X Configuration:  Still wrong with my Trident CyberBlade XP chipset on this laptop.  I get a mini window with lots of black space all around.  Slackware 12 does the same thing, BTW, but some other Slackware based distros (Zenwalk, AliXe, Wolvix) get it right.  AliXe uses Zenwalk's vconf utility before starting X.  If we could integrate vconf into the installer that would solve the problem.  I don't know how Wolvix does it but I could do some digging.

Relevant sections of the xorg.conf file generated by VL:

Section "Monitor"
 DisplaySize 269 201 # 96 DPI @ 1024x768
Identifier   "Monitor0"
VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName    "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 37-48
VertRefresh 72-75
EndSection

Identifier  "Card0"
Driver      "trident"
VendorName  "Trident Microsystems"
BoardName   "CyberBlade XPAi1"
BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

A correct xorg.conf file for my system:

Section "Monitor"
   Identifier     "Monitor1"
   VendorName   "TOS"
   ModelName    ""
     HorizSync 31.5 - 50.0
     VertRefresh 40-90
     Option "UseEdidFreqs" "1"
   Option       "DPMS"
EndSection


# **********************************************************************
# Graphics device section
# **********************************************************************

# Any number of graphics device sections may be present

Section "Device"
   Identifier     "Videocard1"
   VendorName  "Trident Microsystems"
   BoardName   "CyberBlade XPAi1"
   Driver     "trident"
   BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Note that the error is in the monitor section, not the device section.

3.  Not a bug, but... the ugly prune has got to go!

The good news:  performance is excellent and everything I've tried so far has worked.  I need to do more testing, of course.

[Pita]

I lost my sound!

Do you mean that at one time with your VL5.9 install you actually did have sound? Or with VL5.9 you have never had sound working with your audio card in that machine? Did you do any upgrades in between installing 5.9 and noticing your sound was not working? Please be more specific so we can help you.

Also please supply output from the following commands:

lspci
lsmod

thanks!

I always had sound in VL5.9-* and it is back after a reboot. What happened I did a telinit 1 then a telinit 2 and that caused the problem. I just repeated it and sure enough the sound was bust. I did not realize it yesterday since I did not access sound for a while after that telinit.

BTW in the menu of fluxbox-Multimedia audacious is still showing instead of xmms.

Thanks and regards.

[MikeCindi]

I would have to agree that the grape icon doesn't fit. If the dev team is determined that it should all the other icons need to change...but please don't do it as the default setup.

As with the other RCs (and 5.8 too) I am unable to login to a console after logging into any of the available GUIs. Also after doing more checking I am only able to login to whatever specific choice I make first whether GUI or console (i.e. if I login to jwm then want to change to xfce I am unable to do so). To change the environment I have to reboot. I have not yet tried skipping the login manager but I suspect my problem is there.

BTW is there a way to fix the problem with the smileys? Whenever an 8 is followed by a ) you get . Perhaps now that VL is moving on from the 5.8 series I won't be so annoyed by it. Of course VL 5.8 is .

[lagagnon]

BTW is there a way to fix the problem with the smileys?

That is just a forum problem, and it can be fixed by choosing the Additional Option, Don't Use Smileys. 

[exeterdad]

BTW is there a way to fix the problem with the smileys? Whenever an 8 is followed by a ) you get Cool. Perhaps now that VL is moving on from the 5.8 series I won't be so annoyed by it. Of course VL 5.8 is Cool

I've been running into that problem a lot in the packagers forum as I'm often using a ) after a 5.8.
I resolved that by adding spaces. ( 5.8 ).

[caitlyn]

Additional bugs to report:

1>  I think this has already been reported, but... once, when choosing K3B from the Xfce menu the application didn't start and my panel (taskbar) disappeared.  It's worked fine the rest of the time.

2>  Reboot doesn't work on my Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204.  The system goes through the shutdown process (stopping the OS) and then hangs with a black screen and power on.  Executing a shutdown rather than a reboot does work correctly.  Ubuntu and its clones get this right  while most other distros don't.

Some nitpicking/niggles/annoyances:

1>  It would be really nice to be able to assign a non-standard mount point to a partition during installation.
2>  It would be really nice to be able to select a system default language/locale other than English/US during install.  I keep thinking a Canadian distro would at least offer French/CA and French/FR as alternatives.
3>  k3b doesn't support taking a bunch of MP3 files, converting them to CD audio, and burning a CD.  GnomeBaker does and for that reason alone I think I'd prefer it as the heavyweight CD burner.
4>  It would be nice if Xfce were optional for people who prefer fluxbox or jwm.
5>  It would be nice if HAL and VL-Hot used the same mount points for the same devices.

I'll post more as I find things.

[wcs]

k3b doesn't support taking a bunch of MP3 files, converting them to CD audio, and burning a CD.  GnomeBaker does and for that reason alone I think I'd prefer it as the heavyweight CD burner.

k3b does that as well, so far as I know. In fact, I just burned an audio CD like that yesterday.
I'm not sure about gnomebaker's dependencies, but I think k3b only requires kdelibs (or little more than that), so that might be a plus for k3b.

[uelsk8s]

2.  X Configuration:  Still wrong with my Trident CyberBlade XP chipset on this laptop.  I get a mini window with lots of black space all around.  Slackware 12 does the same thing, BTW, but some other Slackware based distros (Zenwalk, AliXe, Wolvix) get it right.  AliXe uses Zenwalk's vconf utility before starting X.  If we could integrate vconf into the installer that would solve the problem.  I don't know how Wolvix does it but I could do some digging.

Relevant sections of the xorg.conf file generated by VL:

Section "Monitor"
 DisplaySize 269 201 # 96 DPI @ 1024x768
Identifier   "Monitor0"
VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName    "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 37-48
VertRefresh 72-75
EndSection

Identifier  "Card0"
Driver      "trident"
VendorName  "Trident Microsystems"
BoardName   "CyberBlade XPAi1"
BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

A correct xorg.conf file for my system:

Section "Monitor"
   Identifier     "Monitor1"
   VendorName   "TOS"
   ModelName    ""
     HorizSync 31.5 - 50.0
     VertRefresh 40-90
     Option "UseEdidFreqs" "1"
   Option       "DPMS"
EndSection


# **********************************************************************
# Graphics device section
# **********************************************************************

# Any number of graphics device sections may be present

Section "Device"
   Identifier     "Videocard1"
   VendorName  "Trident Microsystems"
   BoardName   "CyberBlade XPAi1"
   Driver     "trident"
   BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Note that the error is in the monitor section, not the device section.

caitlyn,
I have been looking into AliXe to see how it gets the numbers it had for your monitor.
in vconf it has generic HorizSync and VertRefresh values  built in as defaults if it cant find them by probing.
I am not sure why the generic values work better for your monitor than the ones VL finds by probing.
I booted the AliXe cd here and out of the 4 boxes it only got a working X on one of them. It got me 3 black monitors with out of range messages.

I just wanted to let you know we are trying to come up with something that will work there.
Uelsk8s

[GrannyGeek]

On my Turion laptop, I'm using VLwifi to get my WPA connection going. As I already reported, I have to do the whole setup over every time I boot.

Today I again had the problem of the wireless connection simply disappearing all of a sudden. I couldn't restore it by running VLwifi again. I had to reboot in order to get my connection going again.

This happened once before a few days ago, but it's been solid until today.
--GrannyGeek