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Comments and niggles with 2007


neddie
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Just thought I'dd add some first impressions after my upgrade to 2007. Overall I'm very impressed, it's working smoothly and I'm very happy I upgraded. I have had some niggles, most of which are minor and some of which are solved - maybe the solved ones will help others, maybe you can help me with the unsolved ones ;)

 

The install

As mentioned in a separate thread, I tried to install using the single "mini" CD (a full CD for a minimal install) obtained via BitTorrent. Unfortunately, after installing the X didn't work, XFdrake didn't work and the network didn't work, so I had to try again using the Mona live CD. I believe there are only a few differences between Mona (RC1) and the final release, and I'm hoping that any differences there are can be easily fixed by updating packages. Correct me if I'm wrong... :unsure:

 

The install from the mini CD was just text and keyboard, which worked fine (or at least appeared to) but the Mona install step was graphical and also easier (and much shorter).

The boot splash is much improved in appearance, the 2005 one featured the starry-eyed crazy penguin so it's nice to see it looking a bit more consistent. The login screen is orange with "One" but I guess I can change that later.

 

The included apps

It already came with the apps from the live CD, so that means OOo, Firefox, Gimp and a reasonable selection of tools. No Mozilla any more, but Firefox is ok. I don't like the separate Google bar top right (which is far too small), I'm used to Mozilla where it's all done in the single URL bar which is much more convenient - now I type in half my query in the URL bar, then delete it, click to the Google bar and then try again. Just need to get used to it but there's no reason to have 2 and the Google one isn't big enough for even simple queries to be seen in full. Also when I right-click on a link and select to open in a new tab, I like this tab to be selected too rather than hiding in the background - that was fixed in the Preferences for "Select new tabs opened by links".

 

Aiglx

The 3d stuff works fine, and is impressive, but that "feature" which shifts the whole screen when the mouse hits the top-right corner of the screen is just as annoying as expected - every time I try to close a maximized window everything jumps out of the way. I press escape to undo it but it brings some other random window to the front instead. And I can't find a way to turn this thing off - I tried the 3d config in the mcc but it doesn't appear to do anything. Even disabling all the plugins and rebooting had no effect, and it didn't seem possible to alter the key bindings to also enable the transparency and the zoom.

 

urpmi

Haven't seen any segfaults, like other people have mentioned. I added the mirrors by following the mandrivalinux download links to the isos on a nearby mirror, and then navigating up to the media/release directory, and copying that into the media manager. For the plf I followed advice and used easyurpmi to get 2006 links (on free.fr) and then navigating around there to find the 2007 links.

 

The tool itself seems much improved, with additions, removals and updates all within the same tool (as it should have been a long time ago). It's annoying that you can't do it from the menu though, because I don't get the opportunity to type in the root password to allow installs - the menu item "Install, Remove and update software" just runs as a normal user and so can never have permission to install, remove or update. Silly. Instead you have to open a console, do an su, and then type mcc and watch the horrible error messages scrolling up the console window while it runs. And every time I try to do an update, it just hangs and chews all my CPU until I kill -9 it. Maybe I need to use the console commands instead for an update? Any clues how I could do that, anyone? :unsure:

 

Also when I try to close the window, nothing happens, and the app continues to react normally - until I click on a checkbox and then the window closes. Odd.

 

Extra software

All the other stuff installed very smoothly from the tool, including inkscape, digikam, hugin, thunderbird, amarok, lame, perl, kdiff3 and lots of other cool stuff. I added the java sdk, java3d, eclipse and GoogleEarth from my previously downloaded installers, and they all went fine too. I also got Skype from their download page. I was disappointed to not find tuxracer, but then found it as ppracer instead. With digikam, I was delighted to see they've got their multiple tag search finally implemented (eg, "show me photos of me at that place") but very disappointed to see no slide show any more. Arg! :o Fortunately I found that in a separate rpm, kipiplugins, which cheered me up no end as I was struggling to recompile my previous version 0.8.1 from source.

 

Task bar

I don't know where it's configured, but the text on the task bar is now a wishywashy shade of grey that's impossible to read. The current window title is black and bold, so that's ok, the open window titles are also readable, but the minimized windows can't be read at all. I've tried config -> KDE -> Appearance -> Colours and also panel config -> Appearance but can't seem to change it.

 

I also got myself tied in knots trying to set up the shortcuts on the left side of the kicker - whenever I tried to drag them around to reorder them, the taskbar shifted ever further to the right and the shortcuts jumped around randomly. The answer was to use right-click instead, and select the "Move" option.

 

Speed, stability

My general feeling is that it's faster, although I haven't timed anything. It seems a little quicker to boot than 2005, but it seems to pause in a couple of places (noticeably hald) so it might go even faster with tweaking. Applications (like Kate, Gimp, OOo) seem to start up quicker than before, some very noticeably. It's all responsive, and nothing's died spectacularly yet. GoogleEarth doesn't quite like the Aiglx stuff, showing severe screen glitches, but as long as other apps are minimized it settles down. I had heard that there were problems with Java and Aiglx but don't see that here - Swing apps, java3d apps and eclipse are all fine. So as I said I'm very happy with it - there's lots more to play with and get used to but first impressions (after the first failed install) are very positive.

 

:thumbs:

 

 

[moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

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Nice review Neddie. I like 2007 too, unfortunately there's an annoying glitch in xgl/compiz which messes up my keyboard and I would have to start keyboarddrake everytime I restart X.

 

Btw, there was a way to turn of the annoying "compose" feature, just forgot how, try installing csm...

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ffi: Tried installing csm, but it didn't help. I restarted X and nothing worked any more, but after re-enabling the plugins in drak3d it recovered. In the 3d config I can't see 'compose' either, I disabled 'place' but that didn't change anything.

 

Couple of other points - since the upgrade in Konqueror, a single click opens files rather than just selects them. Also in digikam, a single click on a thumbnail opens the picture, whereas I just want to select it. That should be an obvious option in the KDE config whether it's double-click or single-click to open, but I can't find it. Any clues? :unsure:

 

I got the update working from the command line, it was simply

urpmi --update --auto-select

and after confirmation it downloaded 24MB of updates.

 

Oh, and for those who didn't believe me when I said the 2007 install was text-only, keyboard-only, here's a screengrab of one of the screens to prove it!

post-10937-1160256492_thumb.jpg

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The tool itself seems much improved, with additions, removals and updates all within the same tool (as it should have been a long time ago). It's annoying that you can't do it from the menu though, because I don't get the opportunity to type in the root password to allow installs - the menu item "Install, Remove and update software" just runs as a normal user and so can never have permission to install, remove or update. Silly. Instead you have to open a console, do an su, and then type mcc and watch the horrible error messages scrolling up the console window while it runs. And every time I try to do an update, it just hangs and chews all my CPU until I kill -9 it. Maybe I need to use the console commands instead for an update? Any clues how I could do that, anyone? unsure.gif

 

Also when I try to close the window, nothing happens, and the app continues to react normally - until I click on a checkbox and then the window closes. Odd.

If I remember well, this problem existed in cooker for some weeks but it got solved. My computers have no problem running the MCC from the menu, which will launch the password box for root immediately. Make sure that you have the latest version of the draktools installed (as you used Mona, remember that the packages were not fixed there yet).
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hat should be an obvious option in the KDE config whether it's double-click or single-click to open, but I can't find it. Any clues?

 

Peripherals/Mouse

 

It's in there, I'm not on my Mandriva machine at the moment, but it's in the start menu somewhere, ???????/KDE/Peripherals/Mouse, it's there somewhere anyway.

 

 

[Edit]

System/Configuration/KDE/Peripherals/Mouse ?

Edited by jagwah
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Aha, you're right. If I look closer at the drakxtools in the software updater they have little blue arrows beside them, but if I select "Show all updates" then it's empty. As I said I've done an update from the CLI but I guess it didn't work the way I thought it did. Thanks.

 

KDE/Peripherals/Mouse
Thanks jagwah, spot on! :thumbs:

 

I just realised that when I used the flag --update, it would only pick up the updates since 2007 - and I need the updates since Mona. So I ran urpmi --media main,contrib --auto-select and now it wants to download 1GB of packages :o

OK, so forget everything I said, I haven't got 2007 installed yet :D but I'm only a gig away! I'm very impressed they managed to update so much since Mona came out!

Edited by neddie
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Task bar

I don't know where it's configured, but the text on the task bar is now a wishywashy shade of grey that's impossible to read. The current window title is black and bold, so that's ok, the open window titles are also readable, but the minimized windows can't be read at all. I've tried config -> KDE -> Appearance -> Colours and also panel config -> Appearance but can't seem to change it.

You have to turn off 3D effects to make KDE themeable. Compiz (the window manager which makes the 3D effects) does not support theming. You can change the color of the window border but that's all. I could do that but only in GNOME.

It's annoying that you can't do it from the menu though, because I don't get the opportunity to type in the root password to allow installs - the menu item "Install, Remove and update software" just runs as a normal user and so can never have permission to install, remove or update. Silly. Instead you have to open a console, do an su, and then type mcc and watch the horrible error messages scrolling up the console window while it runs.

Change the command of the icon to

kdesu rpmdrake

That will ask for the password and then launch the software installer.

Edited by dexter11
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My main gripe is that with 2006 my machine shut down properly. Now, with 2007 it says its powering down, but then the machine resets itself instead of powering down, so I have to power it off manually.

 

Bummer. Not happy with that.

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My main gripe is that with 2006 my machine shut down properly. Now, with 2007 it says its powering down, but then the machine resets itself instead of powering down, so I have to power it off manually.

 

Bummer. Not happy with that.

Odd, which desktop and are you using xgl/aiglx?

 

(even more strangly I had this gripe with 2006 but then I enables some system service and it worked again...)

Edited by ffi
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Ianw, my wifes machine wouldn't power down anymore.... worked fine with older mandrivas/drakes.

I remember that once it wouldn't power down normally, just stayed on, but after completely disconnecting it from the mains, it would shut off.

 

Not this time, so I looked and looked, and I finally found the error was that in the BIOS, acpi was switched off, whereas in the system it was turned on.

Other things to try: boot options:

linux acpi=off noapic nolapic

or: acpi=on

and variations/subsets thereof, and disconnecting from mains (when it's off, obviously, and just once should be ok).

Edited by aRTee
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I opened my topic on it here:

 

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...mp;#entry268038

 

I'll give it a go, already tried disabling apic lapic and stuff. Will try disabling acpi as well and see what happens, and I'll check my BIOS out as well just in case. It's odd, because after a clean install it was shutting down fine. I then applied some updates and it stopped working. I'll have to check the install log to find out what updates were installed, but after looking in the updates tree, acpi isn't one of them.

 

Just using standard stuff, KDE and no xgl or anything like that.

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Another couple of updates:

I got rid of the mouse-corner thing, it is called "scale" in the compiz config manager, and has checkboxes for the mouse hotspots. However, these are all unchecked so I had to disable the scale plugin instead. But no more annoyances trying to close windows :thumbs:

 

The update from Mona went smoothly (eventually), although my network stopped working afterwards. A simple reconfig fixed that (add new connection, Cable modem, DHCP). Also my Start button on the keyboard stopped bringing up the Start menu in KDE, although Start-E still brings up Konqueror. Perhaps related, Alt-F2 no longer brings up the Run dialog.

 

Interestingly it seems that 2007 is set to UTF-8 by default, which might cause some people some hiccups if they weren't on UTF-8 before. I think in 2005 there was an extra checkbox to set UTF-8 in the system settings, but now there's just a cryptic checkbox in the advanced page of locale settings which when checked sets it to not UTF-8. Annoyingly Kate seems to now ignore the selected encoding when opening a file so you have to set it again manually afterwards (now in the Tools menu instead of View).

 

And rpmdrake still feels very flaky, often not closing when you want it to, sometimes closing when you don't. Although the menu issues were fixed by the upgrade.

Edited by neddie
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Alas, I've now said goodbye to the wobbly windows :sad:

 

I thought it was the Aiglx things which were causing my occasional hard lock-ups, so I switched off the 3d desktop things to see if that helped. It certainly helped Google Earth from its graphics glitches, and I thought it was helping the Java3d applications too, but unfortunately it hasn't stopped the intermittent hard lockups with Java3d (the same versions of java and java3d never locked up with 2005). When this happens the keyboard just doesn't respond any more, I've tried Ctrl-Esc, Ctrl-Alt-Esc, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, Fn-Break and all the Ctrl-Alt-F1 to F6 - nothing responds any more. In the absence of any better ideas I ended up with a firm finger on the power button, which then of course brings about a disk rescan on reboot because it wasn't unmounted cleanly. Has anyone else had this, and is there any other solution apart from brutally powering down?

 

Bonus was that Alt-F2 now brings up the run dialog again, so I guess that was being prevented by Aiglx. The Start button still doesn't bring up the menu though, so I have to reach for my mouse. I did see the same issue briefly with 2005, but curiously when I added a second keyboard layout the problem went away - I've tried removing and adding my keyboard layouts here in 2007 but no joy.

 

Oh and one more oddity - when it shuts down, it comes up with a couple of very puzzling lines:

mount: proc already mounted
Unmounting proc file system: umount: proc not mounted

So why's it trying to mount something at shutdown time, and then unmount it immediately afterwards? And how can it be already mounted one minute and then on the very next line not mounted? I guess it's not terribly important because it shuts down anyway, but it'd be nice not to have big red FAILED messages on shutdown.

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If you can still send sysrq's you may want to avoid the brutal shutdown by doing alt-sysrq (keep those pressed) + esuib

 

More info here:

http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs/Kernel

 

just the relevant part from that page, explaining the commands:

reBoot tErm kIll saK showMem powerOff showPc unRaw Sync showTasks Unmount

 

It's basically the Sync and Unmount ones you really really want to press before resetting the machine.

 

This often still works if the Nvidia driver has fully crapped on me, but the keyboard still works - as noted when pressing caps-lock repeatedly, the light still reacts. Note that sometimes the system is really locked, caps-lock has no response, but num-lock does - hard reset is all that helps...

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Well you pretty much foxed me with that advice, I couldn't get it to work at all.

I tried the "echo" of the sysrq file given in the link, and there's already a "1" in it. But I echo'd a 1 in there anyway, and tried a "h" in a console login to try to get some kind of help response. Nothing from Alt-SysRq-h, Nothing from Fn-SysRq-h, nothing from Fn-Alt-SysRq-h, couldn't get any kind of response at all. So maybe it's deactivated somewhere else on this machine.

 

Anyway so I triggered the hang (first time I run java3d it works fine, close the window, run the same program again and it hangs immediately). Caps Lock doesn't light the light up, no response from any keys, nothing from SysRq-esuib but then I didn't expect much by that point anyway. So a violent power-down it is then.

 

I haven't got Aiglx running any more so it's not that (I don't think!), it might be the new modular X or it might just be a bug in java3d that didn't manifest itself with Mandriva 2005. I'll try getting the latest java3d and see if that makes a difference. I'm also not sure if it does it with Google Earth, that has caused X to crash me out to a login screen but not repeatably. I also found some messages in Xorg.0.log about xf86AllocateGARTMemory (Cannot allocate memory) which sounds suspicious, but it's got no timestamps on the messages so I'm not convinced it's related.

 

Oh, and about the /proc mounting/unmounting, I noticed it says something funny at boot too, quite early on, something like "unmounting /proc" and then shortly after "mounting old /proc" - must be linked to those failures at shutdown somehow.

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