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Mandriva 2006 xorg issues


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Your experience with Mandriva 2006 Xorg cvs version  

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  1. 1. Your experience with Mandriva 2006 Xorg cvs version

    • I tried Mandriva 2006 but due to these xorg issues I had to revert to something else.
      6
    • I managed but can't seriously recommend Mdv06 to any ATI or NVidia owners who are Linux novices.
      9
    • I managed but can't seriously recommend Mdv06 to any ATI or NVidia owners even if they are Linux experts.
      0
    • Mandriva 2006 Powerpack works fine, what's this talk about Xorg issues?
      9
    • Mandriva 2006 Free public download works fine, what's this talk about Xorg issues?
      11


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Some on this forum have been stung by xorg related issues due to Mandriva Linux 2006 including a cvs version of Xorg. From the errata:

 

X.org 6.9 issues with free drivers

In order to support new hardware and new video cards, Mandriva now uses X.org 6.9.

This version is rather new and several issues have been reported with ATI and NVidia graphical cards when using free nv and ati drivers. If you experience problems with drivers provided with X.org, you can use one of the solutions below :

- use the driver for your card provided with Mandriva Linux commercial versions (Mandriva club and purchased boxes)

- download the driver from your manufacturer's website (follow the instructions on this site for installation)

- use the VESA standard video driver available through XFDrake

 

There are quite a few comments on how problematic this is.

Personally, I'm using the Powerpack which automatically installs the closed Nvidia or Ati drivers, so I haven't seen any issues.

 

I have come across some mentioning that the choice to use a cvs version is directly related to Intel - my guess is that they had to use this cvs version to be able to call Mandriva 2006 'Intel Centrino certified'.

 

Anyway, I'm trying to see for how many people _here_ this has been a problem. Please don't answer with hearsay, just your own direct experience - it's okay if it's about the issues of a friend that you are helping to move to Linux, but not a friend's story about how he couldn't help someone else get started properly with Mandriva.

Stories read on forums and such are also not relevant in answering these questions.

And yes, I do realise that those who tried Mandriva 06 and couldn't manage and decided to hold off and never showed up here are not getting counted. That's ok, I'm not looking to count them - and yes, I'm sure there are such people.

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I haven't really used the 2006.0 version, but the rc1 and rc2, had some X related stabiliy issues that there never have been on 10.2. KDE or Gnome would just sometimes freeze. A xserver restart would fix the problem for some time.

I have an ATi 9000 Pro card. No problems whatsoever on MDV 10.2 or Kanotix and Knoppix

 

I could probably fix the problem as some others here have advised with installing ATI proprietary drivers, but to tell the truth I'm awfully busy and lazy at the same time and have no time to dig through xorg.conf atm, 10.2 works like a charm for me, so I haven't tried to install 2006.0 (although I had downloaded it, but other reports in this forum warned against that).

 

There were other problems with USB, but that's another topic.

 

-------------

As for this whole issue I'm not that angry that there are bugs, it happens and it's probably in my ability field to fix some of them,

what I'm angry about is that Mandrake decided to release a badly tested, unstable Xorg it being such a vital part of the OS (yeah, yeah, real men use terminal only).

I think that is irresponsible on the users. Ok, so the club members get good drivers, but still..

 

-----

edit: of course it may be that my xserver problems where due to some problem in some other part of the OS, just telling what I experienced

Edited by solarian
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I went back to LE 2005. (after several clean installations) Reasons besides xorg:

 

* on one of my computers I get randomly freezes (as do other people) - without kat, without the acpid bug etc. Also harddisks problem on sata drives and pata DVD-drive. Unusable.

* menudrake is broken, kmenuedit for the first time does not work at all (known bug, nobody cared)

* digikam kipi-plugins --> mjpegtools (to create mpeg slide shows from pictures) are completely broken, only reverting to mjpegtools from 2005 works (known bug, months before the release, nobody cared)

* kaffeine (default kde video player) crashes konqueror after playing streaming media (known bug since months, nobody cared)

* kde text-to-speech: broken

* kicker crashes randomly (known bug)

* localization problem when working with more than one language or with certain characters, also keyboard problems (known bug)

* sometimes I can't logout from KDE, xserver/dm just hangs

* urpmi mirrors: messed md5sums and keys on many mirrors, known since weeks, nobody cares.

* when installing from pata drives (dev/sr0) --> many errors about packages, also cd/dvd writing problems.

* on some computers it is only possible to install with: ide=nodma

* The good working 'USB removable media' in LE: less reliable in 2006, sometimes it works, sometimes not. When writing files to an USB key/drive, often the files are not synced, or worse: the partition is not accessable afterwards.

* kmail is intentionally *broken*: the MDV welcome message can't be deleted.

....

 

--chris

 

[edit] And another reason: I am so tired of the 'patched' KDE MDV version. Try the kio_slave media:/ in MDV :o

JuK and Codeine --> the best functionality just broken.

Edited by anna
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The most interesting thing is that I personally have not experienced a lot of problems with "nv" driver ( I'm to check how the "ati" driver behaves yet) even with X.org 6.9 CVS of Mandriva 2006. It's exactly the other way around - when using Nvidia proprietary driver, X just hangs from time to time, no display updates, no keyboard responses, mouse pointer moves and that's all. Logging in remotely and killing X helps, but further hangups are impreventible - sometimes X hangs again within minutes, sometimes within hours, and sometimes within days. So, it's relative slowness and no 3D ( sometimes I use it ) of "nv" driver vs. hangups of "nvidia" driver.

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I've tried MDV 2006 Free, and it seems to work OK, but the NVidia driver had to be loaded, as OpenGL wouldn't work. But this is the norm on any distro, so nothing major.

 

One of my systems has problems with the mouse disappearing, and therefore a restart of X is required to get it back. This same system also has problems with certain screensavers just running in the top third of the screen. Incidently, a build on one of my computers at home today, the same screensaver works fine.

 

I've not used it extensively enough to find any major problems as of yet, but seems OK so far. All updates have been applied though, to make sure it was stable.

 

Also tried Powerback, but NVidia drivers don't work on it. But resolved with downloading from NVidia directly, and removing the old ones first plus dkms.

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I to use the powerpack version but I find it strange that the troubles are mainly with the download version, sort of makes you want to buy a copy instead of downloading, think about this for a second, and it just shows that there are huge differences in the powerpack and the download versions. If a new linux user were to download mandriva 2006 and then run into the problems mentioned they would no doubt move on to another distro because there are simply to many distros out there that havent got these problems. So this isn't helping mandrivas popularity or reputation at all.

Edited by beast2k
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Mdv 2006 is generally less stable than LE 2005 on my hardware. X issues using the nvidia driver re hangups, freezes and other erratic issues seems like the main problem to me. That kat thing seems to cause a lot of trouble as well and I just uninstalled it. Kat seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Do people really have that hard of a time organizing their files in folders? There are kernel issues as well that don't seem to be mandriva's fault. In particular, smp seems to have been radically reworked in the more recent kernels and some third party modules/patches will not work with the smp kernels any more. Ndiswrapper is one and the win4lin kernel patch is another that I'm aware of. I wouldn't be surprised if some other third party drivers didn't work with smp enabled.

I have 2006 installed but I don't use it much, preferring LE 2005 instead. I'm waiting for the patches/updates to come on 2006 that will correct xorg and some of the other issues that people have mentioned.

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Since I am using Mandriva 2006 x86_64 Powerpack edition (a friend gave a copy to me, don't ask), my experience may not be the same as yours.

 

Other than the 100% cpu usage at 4 AM (fixed with the acpid update), I have not experienced any xorg problems. I am using the Nvidia driver from the CDs and it works well for my GeForce4 Ti 4200. I am having some problems overall, but it's mostly due to using x86_64 bit version (like no Flash plugins, no Sun JRE plugins, need to use mplayer 32 bit version for 32 bit windows codec, etc).

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Guest ken1234

My first visit to this forum and very impressed. Hopefully this will help to assist my odd problems in the future. As regards ATI problems, I have never had a problem providing one configures it correctly on a fresh install, I blamed the Drivers on just one occasion to find problem was with the auto generic monitor drivers. So selecting correct monitor cured problems. most distros provide a test vacilty before install is completed. So make sure correct monitor is detected before embarking on graphic card problems. I must admit I do not require a High spec, as long as I can edit photos at the full colour depth.

 

My main problem I have is loosing the USB functions with Mandrivia 2006, in other words recognises my CF and Pen Drive ok on bootup. BUT.. if you remove and replace, they will not reapear, have tried every thing to access them, but no success, this also applies to my USB harddisk. So went back to mandrivia 2005 where every thing works well apart from detecting my firewire port. now firewire ok on the 2006 version.

At the moment trying out Suse 10.1. Been unable to fault it at this stage.

 

I use removable hard disk drives on 3 PC here, so I never risk loosing my main system. I prefer it to multi boot.

 

 

From Ken.

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It seems that problems with 2006 come into two categories: XOrg(ATI/NV), and KDE!

 

I'm fortunate enough to have no XOrg problem (I have a ATI Rage Fury 128, and a VIA Unichrome).

 

Besides, I'm a Gnome user. For me (I started using Linux with Mandrake 6.0), this new release is simply the best ever!

This is the first time ever, that I feel so comfortable with the new system, and anything that has ever worked before, just works again without any work on my part.

 

Yves.

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I am another person with a problem. When I attemtp to load Man.2006 Official download, all goes well until the reboot, then the normal screen with the slider works through, then a black screen. I have TNT Ultra card and Syncmaster 710 V monitor. I have experienced this problem before with Linux distros, such as SuSe 9.1 and 9.2.

 

What I had to do was to attach my old Daewoo monitor and giggle around with the resolution settings in setup until the programme works. Then I can re-set the Synmaster and resolution. It is a strange problem. Well to me at least and areal hassle. I hope Mandriva geeks can sort out this glick as it is very off putting for new useres.

 

Steve

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Right now running on my lappy the brand new PCLinuxOS 9.2, which is more or less Mandy 2006. The xorg used is much newer than Mandrivas, the nvidia package (with DKMS autobuilder) works flawlessly, but the greek keyboard is still broken (since I know how to fix it, it's no biggie- just annoying).

Anyone with xorg problems in pure Mandy should give the unofficial xorg builds by Thac a try... they are quite good (almost as good as xorg-cvs currently is).

Notice that laptop users *should* disable the Mandy-specific "numlock" service, else they would type weird things!

Edited by scarecrow
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Notice that laptop users *should* disable the Mandy-specific "numlock" service, else they would type weird things!

Yeah, I can tell you a story about that. It took me five minutes to figure out how to log into my new system... I only needed to press two keys, but I was thinking of everything else than pressing the fn+numlock key. Stupid me... :rolleyes:
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