coverup

So, you folks use GNOME... Will try later.... I tried tpb. It did not do any useful job, but was using quite a lot of resources according to top. Perhaps I did not configure it properly. Did you have to change anything in /et/tpbrc? Could you please post yours? By the way, I now have a working script to switch monitors using Fn+F7, which does not require me to restart acpid. It remains to sort out screen brightness and volume buttons.

I found that intermittent pauses occur during /caused by some harddrive activity, when the harddisk LED stays up for a second or so, and I even can feel the vibration. No messages are dumped into /var/log/messages during those activities. I would really like to know what is causing those pauses. As for the pattern, it is hard to say... I was typing some stuff in Emacs earlier today and the pauses occurred every few minutes or so, but now when I am typing this post, there does not seem to be any. However, I disabled Lisa, NFS and a couple of other services.

My Mandriva 2008 laptop noticably slows down at random times, so that I could see the mouse pointer jumping from place to place rather than moving smoothly, or a key "getting stuck" for a short moment. Also, I think, this also coincides with the fans kicking in. The laptop is currently running from AC power and the kpowersave policy is "Performance" which also includes Dynamic speedstepping policy. I don't run any power hungry applications, only Firefox, Emacs and a couple of xdvi-k sessions, Compiz, screensaver and other graphic effects such as launchfeedback, window animations, etc are disabled. The CD tray is empty as well. I wonder what causes the laptop to slow down, and how to make it run run smoothly? It's one of the latest laptops, 2.2Ghz Intel Core Duo, 2Gb memory, there must be plenty of resource. [moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

Could something go wrong during resizing the Windows partition, and his Windows fonts files got damaged or something?

Honored Seriously, is there a documentation on editing/optimizing power usage and speedstepping policies for Mandriva? I presume there must a better way for that than selecting between Powersave and Performance. What are those policies anyway? If I wanted this level of flexibility, I would continue using Windows :D

Thanks, arctic. I should admit, these links confused me even more. 1. So, Mandriva says goodbye to klaptop but still packages it as a part of KDE??? 2. The old post explains that powersave (and its frontend kpowersave) is the replacement to cpufreq, and cpufreq daemon should not be used. Hold on, but on my machine, there is no service named powersave in /etc/init.d. Instead I have service called cpufreq and the service is running! Am I only one with these questions? I remember spending quite a bit of time sorting power management on my previous laptop (Mandrake 9.2). Four years passed and the mess is still there. Well done Mandriva!

I would like to try klaptop instead of kpowersave. Under kpowersave, the fan nearly always on. Also, kpowersave seems to interfere with screen brightness controls. However, I cannot get klaptop to show up in the system tray. Here are the steps I took: 1. I stopped kpowersave 2. I went to KDE control -> Power control -> Laptop Battery -> ACPI Config and clicked Setup Helper Application, entered the root password, and the checkboxes become up active. 3. Enabled standby, suspend, hibernate, performance profiles and CPU trottling, then went through all tabs and chose performance profile Ondemand, and CPU trottling at 00%. 4. Next I went to the Battery tab, checked all boxes, then clicked the "Start battery Monitor" button. Nothing happened. 5. Logout, then Login -> No klaptop icon in the system tray. 6. Went back to the KDE control center, and disabled performance profiles and CPU trottling, in case these settings interfere with kpowersave (which should not be running anyway!) 7. Logout, then Login. Nothing again. I did noticed that the fan now takes short pauses, but what on earth controls it??? Tried ps -ef |grep klaptop, and it shows nothing at all. laptop-mode in Services is checked out to start on boot, but its status is "Stopped". Can somebody explain what am I missing? Thanks Edit: PS: I just checked KDE service Manager -> Load on-demand Services -> Laptop battery monitor is not running

Indeed, these inconsistencies in Thinkwiki drive me crazy - often they don't mention the hardware, versions of the tools/kernel, etc. Very frustrating! I doubt thinkpad_acpi and ibm_acpi are too different; it's just that T43 and T61 have very different BIOS plus video drivers for intel and ATI cards again are very different. Here is my progress so far: * I can turn on and off bluetooth (Fn+F5) using a script from ThinkWiki; * Screen blanking works (Fn+F2) using the slightly modified script from the old ibm-acpi package (as suggested by David Batson); * Suspend to RAM (Fn+F4) and Suspend to disk (Fn+F12) work including resume. This did not require any special effort, though the hotkey Fn+F12 had to be enabled by passing the option to the module (echo enable,0xffffff blah blah). All this works without restarting acpid.

Let me double check with you... Currently, I have the thinkpad_acpi module listed in /etc/modprobe.preload, and I added options thinkpad_acpi hotkey=enable,0xffffffff experimental=1 to /etc/modprobe.conf as suggested in ThinkWiki. acpid and acpi services start on boot from /etc/rc5.d, where I have S04acpi@ S14acpid@ My understanding is that the stuff in modprobe.preload and modprobe.conf loads before the stuff in /etc/rc5.d is that correct? In that is correct then it should not be necessary to restart the daemons. Maybe, you could post your modprobe.preload and modprobe.conf? I would be happy to get rid of kpowersave, but it looks like Mandriva uses it to control the cpu speed and temperature instead of cpufreq. But I will try your suggestion and disable screen brightness control in kpowersave. Thanks for your help.

Thank you all for you comments and suggestions. First, let me note that T4x ThinkPads are different from T61 and are much better IMHO (I still have T41). In T4x, the screen brightness and volume are not software controlled, hence these buttons don't rely on acpi events. Unfortunately, this is not the case with T61. Eventually, with the help from ThinkWiki, I managed to get the bluetooth switch, screen blanking and video toggle working by manually adding events descriptions and acpi actions scripts. BUT, they only work after I manually restart acpid and acpi daemons. The system boots Ok, but scripts do not work until I manually restart acpid and acpi. After acpi restart, .the bluetooth and monitor switches and screen blanking work. I cannot see why it is necessary to do manual restart.... As for the LCD brightness, things are messed up in Mandriva quite badly. Most likely the bug is in the kpowersave applet which controls the brightness. At this moment, pressing Fn+Home and Fn+End (brightenss up/down) results in the screen brightness jumping to 100%. This silly bug takes over any other scripts you would provide for this. As I mentioned, Ubuntu handles ThinkPad controls a lot more gracefully, and I am considering switching to Ubuntu. The LCD is one of the main power drains, lack of proper control to adjust it properly is not just a nuisance.

I have tried both echo 0xffff > /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey and echo 0xffffffff > /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey. These commands enable the acpi daemon to listen when a Fn+Fx key is pressed (As a matter of fact, running one of those commands was necessary to activate hibernation via Fn+F12). What Mandriva missing is a set of scripts in /etc/acpi/events and /etc/acpi/actions that make the system respond to the special buttons. Ubuntu comes with a wealth of such scripts, while mandriva includes virtually none. For instance, neither tpb nor kmilo have any effect on the screen brightness, they only display the current level setting in /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness on the screen. Contrast to this, in Ubuntu Fn+Home, Fn+End does actually reduce/increase the brightness. same goes to the bluetooth and other Fn keys, they just work out of the box. So, my question, is it possible to download those scripts for Mandriva?

Thanks for the replies. I have the thinkpad-acpi package (which replaced ibm-acpi) but it still does not allow me to switch between the LCD and an external display, neither can I switch on/off bluetooth. I looked at the ibm-acpi scripts but was concerned they might interfere with 2008 scripts such as hibernation one, so I removed them...

Does anybody have ThinkPad T61 special keys working under Mandriva 2008.0 Free? I have just tried Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 Live CD, and to my surprise all special keys Fn+F2 to Fn+F12 work as they should. Only key that does not work is Fn+F7 (display switch). With Mandriva, only Fn+F4 (suspend to RAM) and Fn+F12 (suspend to Disk) work. I found that /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey is sat to "disabled" on boot in Mandriva 2008.0. But even after I enabled the special keys, none of them work except for Fn+F4 and Fn+F12. A brief comparison between /etc/acpi/ibm/ in Ubuntu and Mandriva shows that in Ububntu, the directory is populated with scripts and events, while in Mandriva only the power management events are present by the thinkpad_icpi modules. Why is this difference? How to get the keys work under Mandriva?

I tried configuring VPN connections (openVPN and CISCO) but they did not work. Surprisingly, I can't find an option to delete them in the Mandriva Control Centre? Am I missing something?

Ok, I now have 2008.0 on my Thinkpad and am learning my way around my first Mandriva (all previous distros were Mandrake :-). This time around I would like to try using Mandriva/KDE GUIs as much as I can, and one problem I have is this... At work the laptop is connected to network via the ethernet connection, and at home I use wireless. There are WiFi access points at work too, and the network applet (the one in the system tray) picked them too. After spending the laptop at work (suspend to RAM), and resuming it at home, I found the list of work WiFi networks in the system tray, but my home WiFi was no longer on the list (it does not broadcast SSID). I had to configure it over again and even reboot to get things work (I could have shutdown the laptop if I new I would have to reboot ). The config scripts new all the parameters but I still had to go through the dialogs. Sure I could simply ifdown wlan0, edit ifcfg-wlan0 and then ifup wlan0, but I wanted to see how the scripts can handle this, and frankly I am a bit confused 'cause I did not find this option in Mandriva/KDE. Windows at least has a list of preferred networks, and when you are near one of them, Windows hooks up to it automatically. Is there a similar option in Mandriva? It looks to me as this is the problem with the particular net applett. Are there any other I could use? Having a list of preferred networks seems to be a most natural thing to have.

The best solution to the problem of fuzzy looking fonts was to turn on autohinting by adding the following section to ~/.fonts.conf (at the very end, right before </fontconfig>) <match target="pattern" > <edit mode="assign" name="autohint" > <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match> This may or may not work without libfreetype6 from the PLF repo. I did install it but was not satisfied with the result.

The correct place to put the image is /home/username/.kde/share/icons/NameOfTheIconThemeYouUse/32x32/apps

I am answering my own post for the benefit of those who might have had the same question... I just installed libfreetype6 from the PLF repository, and that was it. On my screen, this actually turned things to a worse - fonts became sharper, but thinner and harder to read. It also turned out that the change could not be reversed... unless you are willing to take risk :D Download libfreetype6 rpm from the Mandriva repository, then as root #rpm -i --force libfreetype6-2.3.5-2mdv2008.0.i586.rpm This will install Mandriva's version of libfreetype6 alongside with that from PLF. Now you can uninstall the PLF version in a usual way via MCC or urpmi. This will leave only libfreetype6-2.3.5-2mdv2008.

Subpixel hinting is disabled in the KDE fonts menu (the button is grey) on my Mandriva 2008 system. How can it be enabled without recompiling everything? The laptop has Intel 3100 graphic card if that's relevant.

The problem is likely the wpasupplicant. Perhaps you need to recompile it to add support for your card. This is easy to do, just download the source and read the documentation.

Just another proof that Gnome sucks :P Seriosly, an excessive use of swap signals that one of the applications has a memory leak.

These phones are just wireless headsets. Mandriva will recognize them as soundcard devices, and you will be able to use them as such but the keypads will be dead. Under WinXP, those phones are controlled by their own drivers so the keypads have some extra functionality such as scrolling through the list of contacts and dialing, but frankly those extra functions are pretty much useless since you still have to have skype running on the computer. The phone which SoulSe mentioned is, in fact, a crippled PDA in a phone package,. It has a WiFi card, so it can run its own version of skype. But do some research before you buy it - I read a review a while ago which claimed that apparently they could only connect to unencrypted WiFi networks. I can't confirm that but consider yourself warned.

I have found a solution... It appears that Compiz and DVD playback do not get along... I disabled Compiz and am watching a DVD just fine.

I need help with DVD playback on my fresh 2008.0 Free system. I configured PLF media, main. contrib, updates, etc, and installed Kaffeine, MPLayer, xine/gxine, totem, libdvdcss, libcss0, as well as win32 codecs libcss0 from PLF. My experiences are: (1) Kaffeine plays back the soundtrack only but the screen remains black. (2) xine/gxine produce an error: This is xine (X11 gui) - a free video player v0.99.5. (c) 2000-2007 The xine Team. AFD changed from -2 to -1 X Error of failed request: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation) Major opcode of failed request: 141 (XVideo) Minor opcode of failed request: 19 () Serial number of failed request: 2175 Current serial number in output stream: 2176 (3) Totem also crashes on an attempt to open the disk libdvdnav: Using dvdnav version 1.1.8 from http://xine.sf.net libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.9 for DVD access libdvdread: Attempting to use device /dev/sr0 mounted on /media/cdrom for CSS authentication libdvdnav: Can't read name block. Probably not a DVD-ROM device. libdvdnav: Unable to find map file '/home/<username>/.dvdnav/.map' libdvdnav: DVD disk reports itself with Region mask 0x00e50000. Regions: 2 4 5 libdvdread: Attempting to retrieve all CSS keys libdvdread: This can take a _long_ time, please be patient libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.VOB at 0x00000200 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.VOB at 0x000068d6 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB at 0x00025c7b libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_02_0.VOB at 0x0002608f libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_02_1.VOB at 0x000260a3 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_03_0.VOB at 0x0002638a libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_03_1.VOB at 0x0002639e libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_04_0.VOB at 0x00026899 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_04_1.VOB at 0x000268ad libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_05_0.VOB at 0x0008b0eb libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_05_1.VOB at 0x0008b0ff libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_06_0.VOB at 0x00309250 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_06_1.VOB at 0x00309264 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_07_0.VOB at 0x00384028 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_07_1.VOB at 0x0038403c libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_08_0.VOB at 0x0038bb1e libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_08_1.VOB at 0x0038bb32 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_09_0.VOB at 0x00391943 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_09_1.VOB at 0x00391a5b libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_10_0.VOB at 0x003d1a43 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_10_1.VOB at 0x003d1b5b libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_11_0.VOB at 0x003d1c9b libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_11_1.VOB at 0x003d1db3 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_12_0.VOB at 0x003d1ef3 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_12_1.VOB at 0x003d200b libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_13_0.VOB at 0x003d214b libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_13_1.VOB at 0x003d2263 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_14_0.VOB at 0x003d23a3 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_14_1.VOB at 0x003d24bb libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_15_0.VOB at 0x003d25fb libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_15_1.VOB at 0x003d2713 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_16_0.VOB at 0x003d2853 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_16_1.VOB at 0x003d296b libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_17_0.VOB at 0x003d2aab libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_17_1.VOB at 0x003d2bc3 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Found 17 VTS's libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 AFD changed from -2 to -1 The program 'totem' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program. The error was 'BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)'. (Details: serial 134 error_code 11 request_code 141 minor_code 19) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.) (4) Finally, mplayer crashes, and also causes the KDE Window Decorator to crash. In summary, I cannot get any of the videoplayers play the DVD! Sounds unbelievable to me.... Please, any help?

So, which of the two suspend-to-disk mechanisms does Mandriva 2008 use as default?