Urza9814

So it turns out I'm still having some trouble. Not _too_ terrible, but annoying. When I first boot up it gives me the same error. I run the following commands: rmmod wl rmmod b44 rmmod ssb modprobe wl And after that it works fine, and after a couple seconds ssb and b44 start back up, and everything's great. So it seems that wl won't start if ssb is already running, but as long as wl is started before ssb starts there isn't a problem. Anyone have any thoughts on why this is happening, or some way I could change the order that they start on boot and see if that fixes it?

Thank you! It seems to be working, finally. I'm not sure if I had that package installed or not actually, as when I did 'latest' it upgraded my kernel (from 2.6.31.2 to 2.6.31.6) and installed for the newer kernel. It did get a bit screwy - it said it was disconnecting and reconnecting about 5 times when I first started the connection, but everything seems good right now.

Ok, one other addition - I seem to have figured out how to make it work, it's just a huge pain. I set it up to use ndiswrapper, then I start the network manager and hit configure. It says it's currently being managed by ssb and asks if I want to switch to manage it with ndiswrapper. Before I click anything, I open up konsole and run: rmmod b43 rmmod b44 rmmod ssb Usually I have to attempt this several times, as b44 automatically restarts itself less than a second after it stops, and ssb can't be stopped if b44 is running. And sometimes after stopping ssb all three of them will restart. But anyway, if I do it just right, after stopping all three of those I can then hit 'yes' to have ndiswrapper manage my wifi card rather than ssb, and then it'll work. Usually. Sometimes it'll just time out trying to connect to networks and I have to reboot and go through all this again. I've tried blacklisting the b43, b44, and ssb modules, but that doesn't work - ndiswrapper still tells me my card is being managed by ssb, even though ssb is not running. Also, b44 is used for my wired card, so removing b44 causes me to then have no ethernet drivers - and I use those more than I use the wifi.

Alright, I've got a Broadcom BCM4312 that I can't get working on Mandriva 2010. Worked great on 2009 Spring, but not anymore. The strange thing is, it works absolutely perfectly when I'm running from the LiveCD, but when I actually install to disk it doesn't. When I try to configure it, it says 'unable to find network interface for selected device (using wl driver).' It did randomly start working once, but after rebooting it failed again and hasn't worked since. I've also attempted to use NDiswrapper instead of the wl driver, but it just says 'cannot connect to ndiswrapper interface' or something along those lines - I've done another (my fourth) fresh install since then, still no luck. Any suggestions? I just don't understand how it could work on the LiveCD but not on install. I have even tried unchecking the box during install that removes unused hardware support. Here's (I believe) the relevant portions of /var/log/messages: Jan 16 17:56:29 localhost net_applet[3088]: running: /usr/bin/draknetcenter Jan 16 17:56:29 localhost draknetcenter[5401]: ### Program is starting ### Jan 16 17:56:32 localhost draknetcenter[5401]: running: /bin/rpm -q --qf %{name} wireless-tools Jan 16 17:56:32 localhost draknetcenter[5401]: running: dmidecode Jan 16 17:56:32 localhost draknetcenter[5401]: Found settings for driver "wl" in category "network::connection::wireless" Jan 16 17:56:33 localhost draknetcenter[5401]: Required kernel_module package for module "wl" is already installed, skipping Jan 16 17:56:33 localhost draknetcenter[5401]: No tools package for module "wl" is required, skipping Jan 16 17:56:33 localhost draknetcenter[5401]: No firmware package for module "wl" is required, skipping Jan 16 17:56:33 localhost draknetcenter[5401]: Loading module wl Jan 16 17:56:33 localhost draknetcenter[5401]: Settings for driver "wl" applied Jan 16 17:57:01 localhost CROND[5536]: (root) CMD ( /usr/share/msec/promisc_check.sh)

I seem to be having trouble on KDE 3.5, Mandriva 2009.1. At the moment I have a dual-monitor setup where each monitor runs a separate X session, so I can play a game fullscreen while I have IM, music, browser, and whatever other tasks on the other monitor. If I have it set as Twinview, fullscreen games black out both monitors. But anyway, that's not really my problem. The problem is that I can't get out of the game to do anything on the second monitor without completely exiting. None of the KDE shortcuts for changing desktops (ctrl-tab), switching windows (alt-tab) or shortcuts I added for minimize and shade will do anything. Any ideas how I could get the game to either minimize or release mouse control? Quite a few of the games I'm interested in using don't allow windowed play, so that unfortunately isn't an option.

Ok, so my wireless card was having some problems, so I was screwing with that, but at one point when I was configuring ndiswrapper I selected the wrong driver and ended up with ndiswrapper controlling my wired ethernet card. And now I can't download any large files ('large' meaning a couple megs) without my connection dying and refusing to come back until I do a complete reboot. (I've tried ifdown and ifup, as well as ifplugd -ki) But now I can't figure out how to get rid of it. I believe my card should be using the b44 driver, but every time I try removing and/or blacklisting ndiswrapper and reconfiguring it, mcc says that there's no adapter to configure. I don't mind if this means completely removing ndiswrapper, as I did manage to get my wifi back to the native driver...so the only thing it's being used for now is the wired. Oh, and some miscellaneous info that may be useful: Ethernet card: BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX Mandriva version: One 2009.0 Kernel version: 2.6.29.1-desktop586-4mnb ndiswrapper version: 1.55

Ok, I ran 40 passes (left it running all day and all night) and got no errors - though I do have it running underclocked, as this was suggested to try to fix any problems I was having. So now I'm running off the 2009 Spring One Live CD, and I'm gonna put it through some stress (Freenet - pretty much crashes it without fail by the end of the night) to hopefully determine if it's hardware or software.

Yea, I have memtest...and about every third or fourth time I run it it finds an error, so I'm not sure what that means. lol

Huh. Well, I left on friday morning to attend my brother's graduation, so sorry for the late reply, but...: I left my computer running when I left, just on the command-line, which I probably shouldn't have done, but it worked out. When I got home it was locked up again, so I did a hard reset...and it booted up and is working perfectly. Very strange. Now I need to get the new 2009 Spring installed and see if that does anything for the locking up. If not I think it's my RAM. Oh, and the problem couldn't be my Windows partition - I haven't booted that thing in _months_. Actually I'm pretty sure it's been more than a year now. :)

yea, It's using UUIDs. # Entry for /dev/sda2 : UUID=61bd293e-345c-11dd-ad0b-259b88ddc9d9 / ext3 relatime 1 1 # Entry for /dev/sdc1 : UUID=d4c29825-18cd-428d-a49e-06a449a83883 /Backups ext3 relatime 1 2 # Entry for /dev/sda5 : UUID=35bc3130-345d-11dd-adee-0bdd13b90602 /home ext3 relatime 1 2 /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0 /dev/sda1 /mnt/fnet jfs relatime 1 2 # Entry for /dev/sda1 : UUID=FAA03F4AA03F0D1F /mnt/windows ntfs-3g defaults 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 # Entry for /dev/sdc5 : UUID=b714fe21-744b-48f5-8380-c1a5a45e5538 swap swap defaults 0 0

Ah, sorry, I have in fact tried that as well, and it throws the same exact error message.

Ok, so at some point last night my system crashed. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but it does that every once in a while, and I haven't yet had time to figure it out (kinda hard to when it only happens once a week or so...). Anyway, I reboot this morning and while running the disk scans it throws the bad superblock error: The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device> Now, it's throwing the error when I try to fsck /dev/sda5, which is an ext3 filesystem mounted as /home. Now, if I try 'mount /dev/sda5' it says that it can't find /dev/sda5 in fstab. But if I do 'mount /home' it works fine. And then I can su to my user and run startx, and at first everything appears fine...but some apps start _really_ slow and appear to freeze - Pidgin, Konqueror, VLC, Kaffeine, and MCC run fine, yet Firefox, Epiphany, World of Warcraft (through Cedega), and Diskdrake won't run. Anyone got any ideas I can try? It has the feeling of hardware failure to me, but it seems strange that only that partition would fail. My root partition is on the same drive and I have no problems at all with that.

Ah! I like that powertop program. The only problem I have is it's suggesting things like 'Enable SATA ALPM link power management' and 'changing VM dirty writeback from 4.99 to 15'. I have no idea what those mean, and I'm not sure I want to be changing things I don't understand...because I don't know how they'll impact performance when I'm _not_ trying to squeeze every last minute out of my battery.

Huh. thanks. I'm on 2008.1 actually, but it's in my urpmi database as well. Unfortunately, urpmi appears to have _locked up_ trying to install it (I have _never_ seen that happen before...maybe it's just taking forever to install, though I doubt that), but we'll see. I'll get it installed eventually. lol edit: Ah, there we go. It doesn't let me specify a CPU speed manually, but it does let me disable one. I've got my battery life up to 4:30 now :) lol

So I'm trying to figure out how to get the most out of my laptop battery. So far I can get just over 4 hours, but I'm looking to see just how high I can go on my cheap, low-capacity battery. The thing I'm having trouble with is managing the CPU. Currently, I use KPowerSave, which I believe uses cpufrequtils to set the "P States". But the problem is, my only choices are 'Performance', 'Dynamic' and 'Powersave'. On Vista (ugh, I know) I believe (haven't used it in a loong time, for obvious reasons) I can set exactly what frequency to set them at, and even shut down one core entirely if I want. Is there any way to do such a thing in Linux? Because the best I can get so far is both cores running at 800MHz, which is good, but there are times when all I'm running is IceWM and CoolEdit, so I could surely survive on much less. Any suggestions?