scoonma

Thanks, "pstree" got me at least somewhere! Both "menu" and "Mod_Meta_L_Disa"(ble) are started by gnome-session. I also found that the output of "top" in a shell is probably misleading. However, gnome-system-monitor shows the correct memory usage!

Regards,

scoonma

That was exactly the problem under some conditions, but difficult to track down. Some application/process was eating up memory, but the output of "top" didn't help me to identify the evildoer. So I was suspecting the "zombies". With the last cooker update, they seem to be gone.

But I wonder if the flaw is actually solved, as there's no process called "menu" at all now. Does it have to be like this with Gnome 2.16.1?

Anyway, thx for your info!

They turn into processes of status "Z" (from "ps -A x") and can by no means be deleted...

At least I've not found no way by now (i.e. attempts like "kill -9" simply don't work).

Hi all,

another problem on this system which I experienced more than once and constantly bugging me are two processes, which go zombie right after starting X.

The first is the "menu" process, started by /etc/X11/xinit.d/menu, second is "Mod_Meta_L_Disa"(ble), started from the same directory. The bug first occurred in MDV 2006, and I began to compile GNOME on my own to help this. However, the effort was no full success, but version 2007 went fine at the beginning.

Any tips for a workaround/fix on this one please?

Hi folks,

I found a strange problem and ask for your advice. One USB stick of mine did work on this machine using MDV 2006, the USB port also worked with the old Cooker version 2007.0, but not with the new one. Even the control LED does not indicate activity. However; a USB printer on the very same port is working perfectly.

I wonder wether it is a kernel related problem, as there's no difference in using 2.6.17.5 standard kernel or the multimedia desktop version (x86). The mainboard has nForce N2PAP Ultra chipset.

Any ideas please?

Do you actually need suspend/resume functions from the kernel? If your main purpose is running the multimedia kernel, I'd just (temporarily) disable these options from lilo. You could simply make a backup and try a different lilo.conf without them.

I'm not sure how suspend/resume is working internally. Maybe the function tries to boot from the first visible partion (which is not hdeX, but residing within hdaX-hddX space)? Are you able to insert a small /swap partition in the "lower" IDE area and go on with that one? You can use more than one /swap part.

Nice to hear that MCC has moving/resizing abilities now. :-)

But I wonder if you can do this on a running system. Dismounting/Resizing or Moving/Remounting /home may work, but which partition is the system running on? I mean: Can you do this to /root?

So I'd still recommend using an external program, as the GPartED Live CD or other means which assure no partition you try to move/resize is actually in use.

Actually, I have seen a part of this happen in a different forum, where a newbie was encouraged to run as root!!

 

:wacko:

 

Sorry, that's all I gotta say on that matter :D

:-) I'd encourage every rookie to run as root only. By this he'd show as newbie, so he could sue the seller of his (proprietary) system on every error he has.

Happy days to you!

Hi George,

did you go through the HOWTO in the Tips'n Tricks section on this board yet?

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=35606

There's other threads on this subject, too. Maybe you'd consider changing to the new 1.0-9626 nvidia driver (announced on portal news)?

BTW, what's about your nick and the comment in your signature? Did you actually mistype or...? Sorry for asking, but if not ... I've seen much stranger ways of humour within nicks and sigs in the net. ;-)

Hi Ian,

you wrote:

I figured it was time to have a rant. Up until now, I've had no problems getting things to work on my hardware. I've used Mandrake 10.0 Official, 10.1 Official, LE2005 and 2006. All worked fine and I've used them on all my machines at home, and even two at work that I have (desktop and laptop).

 

Now, I upgraded both my work machines to 2007, and I also updated one of my machines at home. Out of the three I've upgraded, I have two with problems that I deem serious.

This is nearly the same with my Mandriva/Mandrake experiences - just with opposite sign! The more I go back in history/version numbers, the more problems and annoyances I had. So it may pose a small wonder why I sticked to Mandy at all - but after the Amiga system finally vanishing out of relevance for a major number of capable software creators, there was hardly an alternative. Windows really sucks to me, and no updated version is likely to change that - being bloatedly fat and rotten to the core compared to the slim, fast and easy to use OS I was used to. I was hardcore Amiga for a very long time and working on my old system from within WinUAE for some time. On top on modern hardware, AmigaOS is actually *flying* like no system I've never seen before or after. Booting time with the same HD I had used before was now below 10s, up to the point where you were able to use the desktop, some seconds of background work not anyone. With this config, Workbench from OS3.9, the graphical desktop outruns every KDE, Gnome, MacOS, Windows or whatever. I don't care about benchmarks. I care about how fast a system "feels" to me, and user responsivity has always been good with AmigaOS. (Preemptive multitasking with almost twenty years of development experience, now showing it's real power. - I'll never forget the constant astonischment from a friend of mine commited to Windows, how fast i could browse the Net with, at that time still using original hardware - software on a CPU with 50Mhz in the new millenium outrunnig Winblow machines using a processor of 500!)

But the need for a modern browser, office system and other stuff was pressing. Always and everywhere people stating Mickysoft data formats being "standard", take it for granted that everyone is content with them and using them. Trying to explain the Gates company does *not* do standards, but instead break them permanently, and use this method as one of their basics to financial success, most people don't care at all - if you were lucky enough they even believed the truth. Obviously none of these "normal" users could see how frustrating that was - a permanent fight against technical features which were actually bugs, only very few could understand what was going on. It was like talking to walls, persuading traffic signs. Who want's to work with data on a permanent basis which is not simply broken or corrupt from the structure by chance, but *designed* to be corrupt? Most advanced technical efficiency eaten up by greed and stupidity.

Sometime I couldn't stand it any more, plus the fact I couldn't afford recent Amiga hardware any more. A colleage of mine showed Mandrake to me at work, and I was impressed. With experiences in UNIX environments from college and the Amiga shell not that different from csh, tcsh, bash or others, I felt I had found the most similar system to my old one within the free world of software. The configuration tool from SuSE for hardware settings and software installation was simply bad. In RedHat, I could not even find a match to MCC. And man, my colleague even showed me how one could do kernel compilation, few steps to be taken, using even a graphical display by "make xconfig"! That was a combination of usability, flexibility and comfortable access to options I knew and understood.

Actually, it was learning to handle a new system, which is a new world on it's own. It was not so easy in the beginning, and earlier versions of Mandriva didn't behave the way I supposed them to. Now the reasons are obvious: 1. My knowledge was not so good. 2. The system was advancing and stabilizing itself. I found linux systems in general much more complex than AmigaOS, but the efforts were rewarding: The more knowledge grew the better I could control what was going on. Plus, I found out that folks who could work on flexible systems, say Amiga or Linux based, did not find it hard to work on Windows platforms (to the "cost" of sometimes getting "mentally sick"). On the other hand, many of those solely bound to Windows are like illiterate confronted with other systems. (Okay, Browsers tend to work for them if already started, the same goes to basic functions of a word processors, but most times that's it.) It's simply beginning with the names of applications. What would a program like "Trillian" do if you have to guess and never read Douglas Adams? Even Firefox could be anything. But that being really smart, handy and multi-platform, it was major breakthrough, same goes to OpenOffice.

For me, linux systems and applications have come to a point of good and reliable everyday usability, and still getting better. Problems are not being caused by Open Source systems developers, but hardware manufacturers and vendors too stupid to realise there's folks different from being content with what is called "standard". Hardware producers holding back information which is needed to create Open Source drivers and a good connection on low levels, at the most critical links of hardware and software, or those who simply don't care for OS bindings will experience they're shooting their own toe. I'm pretty sure of that. The ability of Linux to run on a broad variety of hardware lies in it's nature, somehow. For Windows, this has to be constructed, with Linux, people just do it if they feel the need. If hardware producers disgorge crap, just meant to fit well with Windows solutions and hold back important information for their gadgets to work properly, they should be pressed to a point marking support free solutions the same way. Those who firmly resist are best to be abandoned. One can buy from others who cooperate better. Money talking is a language they understand.

So enough of the long speech - short message:

Please don't blame Mandriva, Ian. I won't hold you back from using Gentoo (and I can't anyway), but a permanent search for the "best" distribution is not what brings progress - and at some point you'll probably be stuck with a different distro the same way. It does not change the bad conditions every distro has to live with.

A friend of mine bought a very fine, top modern soundcard, which is not supported, neither by Gentoo nor by Debian, any linux distro. He's tech addicted and would like to switch over to Gentoo completely, (but bound to use Windows for work). But he'd like to do everything with linux at home, if there were good hardware (and also game) support. What makes you sure another combination of <Your Hardware>/<Distro X version Y> does not pose a problem when changing to version Z? By now, there's no guarantee for linux users at all!

Being in your shoes, I'd be very angry, too. But I'd try to root down the problem to a point, from where I could decide: Is the BIOS and/or hardware so bad it gives you no sound even with Windows, and is there no decent firmware upgrade for your mainboard in acceptable time to make all functions work like thy should, no matter which OS is used? If you cannot change that condition, what is the value of that hardware, of it's producer's service to you then? Now, I'd sell the mainboard on Ebay and to h*** with Gigabyte! You can exchange to the board to another, whose manufacturer is more "linux friendly". (Maybe there should be a linux hardware certificate of quality anyway: "Penguin professional proof" or similar.)

Best regards,

scoonma

Hi Magick,

welcome to this wonderful place! :-)

I'm not exactly sure what is meant by a "compressed" loopback. Are you trying to mount the ".iso" file you downloaded using the loopback device (which would make sense - somehow)? Is it a DVD or a CD version?

Anyhow, I'd call an updating attempt to a system which has the source data lying in one of the partitions which shall be updated, well at least spirited. You normally go safe burning the data to a disc and install from that medium. If you didn't try to install a freshly burnt DVD using a mere CD reading device, it should work.

If you can rule out these conditions, I'd guess there's a problem mounting the initial ramdisk. However, most times you cannot alter data once written on DVD or CD, and it would not make much sense if the ramdisk image were broken. So if a second attempt with a different CD/DVD fails, too (provided the md5 sum of the burnt medium is identical to the ISO image residing on the server you downloaded from), it's more serious. There has been an issue of CD drives (from LG) not working correctly under Linux some time ago. If you had such a drive you had to wait for a firmware update. But such is rare for CD/DVD-ROMS as far as I know. Problems with Win-modems or Win-printers are more common. You could try your medium on a different system or change the reading device of your Compaq (maybe borrow a reader from a friend just for install time). I'm sure you're able to find out the reason - or at least get it working.

Good luck!

scoonma

Hi joaopa,

disabling the "cpufreqd" service using MCC (Mandriva Control Center) or manually do this using chkconfig should be enough. Cpufreqd is for throttling CPU speed, mostly in laptops to save electric power (in order to run just on batteries for a longer period of time). Except for simply disabling this, you could also finetune that option in order to fit your needs. There are different governors and preconfigured schemes.

HTH,

scoonma

First, I updated the bios, I have a 7VTXE on my gigabyte board, and updated to the latest F9 version. Whilst shutdown worked, sound did not. I had done this before years ago and the same problem occurred under Windows. F8 BIOS is also the same, and F7 is the only one that is up-to-date that the built-in soundcard works with.

This is interesting. Though nothing is really known about the very reason causing the faulty condition now, your error description would point me to some difficulty/inconsistency or imcompatibilty of components rather deep inside. Seems you have to wait for a working combo with regard to BIOS and/or Kernel (update).

BTW, are there any mainboard manufacturers who support Linux (well)?

There's another point which comes to my mind: AFIRC there some kernel (compile time?) option, by which you can tell it to disregard/ignore BIOS settings but instead let linux control the hardware all by itself. Perhaps this comes in handy to track down the error - if you're not fed up with it...

Cheers,

scoonma

Hi arun,

just took a look at the scripts. Why don't you adjust them to use on Mandriva? There shouldn't be any major problems. In fact, you don't need need the "pon" and "poff" scripts - as these both come with Mandriva's standard ppp package. So you only need the first two you listed. From a first glance, I couldn't find anything distribution specific in them. They're bash scripts, and most important commands used within are pon, poff and pppd (which Mandriva provides anyway) plus modem-link (which is the second script, also of bash type and relying on common linux stuff, too.)

So chances are good that you can use the two scripts, after adjusting few paths and command options. But you can simply compare paths and options to the ones of your MDV system, or just begin by trying the scripts, wait for the first error, correct the script according to the output message and thus step further. I'd bet you won't find more than twelve locations in all where the scripts need to be changed. I could do the changes, but well, I have no mobile phone to test with (and probably never will own one again :-). But if you're willing to work that out (and learn some aspects of how that stuff works along the way), I could assist you if you have trouble with interpretation of error messages or probs on the way. Others may help, too.

The first error message you added points to line 97 in cellular.pm. The breaking function load_cellular_settings here points to the get_cellular_settings_file function or tries to load settings by readings shell variables. Both locations tell my intuition to look for path discrepancies of the top level script in regard to Mandriva. Within modem-link.sh, I presume you have to change level number for bluez-utils in /etc/init.d. On my system, S99 is linked to local. Which number does the service bluez-utils regularly get in MDV? Is the service is named bluez-utils from Knoppix identical to the one named "bluetooth" of MDV? (Appears like that.) Are there differences which could cause trouble?

HTH,

scoonma

Okay, after editing and rebooting, the PATH var looks better. However, for non-root users the entry /usr/lib/qt3/bin is a double, while for root it looks good. So I presume that path component is set twice: Once systemwide, and once when the user is logging in initially. However, I do not (yet) know which mechanism would cause that behaviour. After all it looks like a small system bug. (A double entry is not elegant, but will probably not hurt anything as long as it contains exactly the same string.)

GREAT! The new kernel worked.

:-) Nice to hear that!

I'm thinking that the slash after "qt3" should be removed.

Yep, I agree. Hey, just found out I have the same error as you! (But it didn't bug me before). I'll adjust and report here again...

Just look at the end of your PATH component. If it is the very same as you posted, you could search your system for the occurence of the string /usr/lib/qt3//bin if you've not been successful using the manual method Steve suggested. In a case like that I'd be using "mc" (being too lazy to memorize the find options :-). Using the search command from the command menu, you can look for every string you like inside all files (which you may need if only the /bin part is added wrongly). Also check "qtconfig" and qt related config files in addition:

/etc/profile.d/qtdir3.sh

/etc/qtrc

HTH,

scoonma

Good to hear you made some progress! :-)

Glxgears is not an application made for benchmarking! What do you get when running googleearth (or some other 3D application you know well; maybe some game showing fps rates?). Does it run smoothly? If yes, everything is okay at this point.

You can trim your xorg.conf by using the many options to suit your very hardware. With my gfx card, it took me some time to realize it's running at standard AGP speed (1x) but capable of doing 8x. Switching that on was a good advancement in speed. You can find out what to trim by first using lspci. Type in a shell window as being root:

lspci -vv

At least one of the entries will show you the output related to your display controller. Properly inspect the "Capabilites" section here. You'll probably find some of the options already switched on, but others not. For a few of them, it's important that your mainboard supports them, too. For them you can check and compare the output of the command above in it's "Host bridge" section.

However, the tweaking options to be used in xorg.conf for your X800 card are likely to be different from my mine (9600Pro). :-)

So I can show you the way, but you have to go by yourselves. But others may help you, too. Darkfoss was so kind to post his working xorg.conf within the "Tips and Tricks" section here:

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=34606

As his card is X800, too, you should have a loook.

Cheers,

scoonma

Hi Geprge,

if you still want a MDV 2007 DVD free version, please try this from a shell window (single line):

wget ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_Linux/MandrivaLinux/official/iso/2007.0/DVD/mandriva-free-2007-DVD.iso

Wget is a *very* well tested and reliable application for downloading. What is more, if the download breaks or stops for whatever reason, the data you've already downloaded is not lost. Instead, you can resume from that point amd get the rest of the file by typing "wget -c <URL>". The -c toggles the "continue" option. :-) Be sure to use it from within the same directory where you began when loading the file. (Otherwise wget will create a new file and restart from the beginning!) Check the terminal output.

You'll probably want to do a md5 check on the new data (compare the output of "md5 mandriva-free-2007-DVD.iso" with the content from the file at the path above) afterwards, before burning the ISO.

HTH,

scoonma

Another place to look at is ~/.xsession-errors.

Hm. There's some timer issues within the kernels. Have you ever tried to use a different one? (multimedia or kernel-linus type from contrib repository?)

Hi mifan,

you can download an ISO image of GPartEd (30MB) Live edition and burn it for using to shrink your /home partition. (Apache and your data should now reside under /.) Then simply create a new /var/www (or just /var) partition and cp everything to the new location. Mabye you've to put an entry /etc/fstab additionally. If Apache refuses to work because of some missing links/dirs or similar, you could save your local setting files, then reinstall apache and put them in their proper places them again.

Cheers,

scoonma

Hi xcomputerman,

at first I'd make sure the module GLCore is not loaded. AFAIK this option is only for nvidia based cards. Does the error occur without that, too?

Second: Please check fglrxinfo. What is the output? Does it indicate Mesa (software based) rendering? With my ATI based system, when I type "startx", I get a similar error message:

(EE) AIGLX error: dlsym for __driCreateNewScreen.... failed (/usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so: undefined symbol ...)
(EE) AIGLX: reverting to software rendering

But this only states that AIGLX is not usable, in fact I *can* use XGL for example - for which 3D acceleration is a prerequisite. Thus asking glxinfo or fglrxinfo, they indicate I'm using hardware rendering. If still in doubt, you could try a program like googleearth: You'll know if hardware acceleration is in use quickly. :-)

Cheers,

scoonma

Ok, there's been many good games, but really on top were:

- Elite (THE best game for many, many years.)

- Silent Service I+II (Aaah - the destroyer's coming!)

- Civilization (*Real* strategy, no bustling action game on maps AKA "real time strategy".)

- FATE - Gates of Dawn (Biggest CRPG I've ever seen or bought with only very best awards, but economically a loss - sad story.)

- UFO - Enemy Unknown (Addictive from the beginning even before having the first small squad.)

- Ports of Call (Are there still people playing computer games together, i.e. not online but in front of the screen?)

- Pinball Dreams/Pinball Fantasies (Why there's no good pinball game today?)