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Mandriva 2008


AussieJohn
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I have now had nearly two days with 2008.

I like the very professional presentation which is miles ahead of earlier versions.

Installing the Nvidia driver from nvidia was a few minutes pain but as I pointed out in another thread post I did solve it quite simply.

 

The Printer was quickly set up aok when I rebooted but due the online connection constantly disconnecting after rebooting, the setup could not connect to Cups. It was only when I noticed the disconnection and fixed it to connect at rebooting that things went AOK.

Never ever had that problem with earlier versions.

 

There are three things that prevent me from switching to 2008 as my main platform from 2007-Spring.

 

First there is no sound. I have gone through every routine mentioned here at MUB to fix the problem but nothing works.

I notice in MCC..... Hardware.....Look at and configure the hardware that there is no <Run config tool> button when clicking on the two audio devices listed so I cannot change any of the audio drivers. Secondly although the on board sound is disabled in the bios it still shows up here (This occurred in 2007-Spring but not in 2007 that I can remember). Also it shows up in Kmix where it appears to be the default in that regardless of the fact that I select Soundblaster Live and close out, the very next time Kmixer is opened there is the Via837 again. This does not happen in 2007 or 2007-Spring.

 

Second item is the scanner. This is the very first time since using the scanner in firewire connection that the scanner is not detected and automatically setup correctly. Prior to using Firewire I used the USB connection and it ALWAYS required all sorts of fiddling around to set it up correctly. That is why I tried Firewire and have used it ever since.

No matter what I try it will still not detect the scanner yet when I reboot into into 2007-Spring, there it is working.

 

I will not be upgrading my numerous friends Computers until I am satisfied that an rpm is available to correct these two major problems. I am not interested in patches or having to change lines in files etc. I can do that on mine if it simple enough otherwise I will stick to Spring. Imagine my friends watching me do a fresh install and at the end of it watching me altering lines in files to get things working. I'd lose all their accumulated trust instantly. When I do new installs I have never had a problem explaining to them about updates since the initial release and they understand that.

 

I think it is safe to say that I am a little disappointed thus far. The only thing that consoles me is that I know Mandriva (through the great AdamW) will fix the problems.

My disappointment is that such basic tools such as Sound and Firewire should not still encounter such problems, it is not as if they are new technology.

 

Third thing.

My Logitech Mouseman Dual Optical has a Back button on its left side which has worked without any fiddling setting up since Mandriva 10.1. Now for the first time it does not work no matter what I fiddle with. What gives ???. This is most annoying because it is such a useful feature. The fact that there are other ways to go back is not the point.

 

On further niggle is that the Glow in Window decorations has been dropped but other crummier decorations which have never impressed me are still in the sets.

Now I have go hunt for this decoration from some other source. I don't yet even know where to start.

 

When I do a fresh Install of Mandriva-Spring, everything works out of the box. Not so with 2008 sadly.

 

Cheers. John.

 

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

Edited by spinynorman
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Sorry to hear you are having your problems John, I've not tried firewire nor soundblaster so I can't comment on them. However I do have the glow window decorations installed by Kde. I have a logitech bluetooth mouse with back & forwards buttons and a few more and all of them worked out of the box.

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As things stand, your problems won't necessarily be fixed, John, as they haven't AFAIK been reported as bugs yet and the information here is too vague to 'fix' them.

 

I'm not exactly sure what your problem is with sound. It seems that Mandriva sees two sound devices, and the one you want to be the default is not, right?

 

Unfortunately this problem is essentially impossible to fix as Linux sound technology stands. It is the kernel that detects the onboard device even though it's disabled in the BIOS - we can't change that. ALSA then picks the order (i.e. which device becomes the 'default'). This is also something we can't really 'fix' (although in general it would be sensible if ALSA knew what chips were usually onboard devices, what were usually sound cards, and preferred the second group over the former...this may be a suggestion to make to the ALSA project). There is a simple and reliable way to make one given device always be the first card as far as ALSA's concerned, but it involves manually editing a file, and therefore fails your criteria, but it is the only real possibility at present. To do this, edit /etc/modprobe.conf , and add the following two lines:

 

options driver1 index=0

options driver2 index=1

 

where driver1 is the driver for the card you want to be the default, and driver2 is the driver for the other card.

 

For your scanner problem, the details you've provided are nowhere near enough to fix the problem. It can only be fixed if you file a bug report at http://bugzilla.mandriva.com/ with information on your hardware - the Firewire controller you have (lspcidrake -v is enough for that) and the exact model of scanner you have.

 

On the mouse buttons, I'm not sure what's happening there. Back / forward still work on my mouse, but I've seen a couple of people mention the same problem as you. As far as I can see, no-one's filed a bug report yet, so again, please file a bug report. Include your exact mouse model, and also /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Also report whether the 'imwheel' package is installed, and an 'imwheel' process is running (ps -e | grep imwheel). Then it's likely we would be able to fix the bug. Thanks a lot.

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Thanks everyone and especially Adam. I'll have a look at what you suggest regarding sound and Firewire.

Yes imwheel is installed.

 

I think you might have missed the point that MCC..... Hardware........Look at and configure the hardware, that there is no <Run config tool> button appearing at the bottom right side when clicking on the two audio devices listed so I cannot change any of the audio drivers. As a consequence I am not certain the correct driver is in place and cannot change it if it is incorrect.

 

I'll let you know asap what I can find out.

 

Cheers. John.

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Thanks everyone and especially Adam. I'll have a look at what you suggest regarding sound and Firewire.

Yes imwheel is installed.

 

I think you might have missed the point that MCC..... Hardware........Look at and configure the hardware, that there is no <Run config tool> button appearing at the bottom right side when clicking on the two audio devices listed so I cannot change any of the audio drivers. As a consequence I am not certain the correct driver is in place and cannot change it if it is incorrect.

 

I'll let you know asap what I can find out.

 

Cheers. John.

 

 

You're right, I couldn't find it either. That's weird, it was there in 2007.1.

Edited by Zac Medley
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Second item is the scanner. This is the very first time since using the scanner in firewire connection that the scanner is not detected and automatically setup correctly. Prior to using Firewire I used the USB connection and it ALWAYS required all sorts of fiddling around to set it up correctly. That is why I tried Firewire and have used it ever since.

No matter what I try it will still not detect the scanner yet when I reboot into into 2007-Spring, there it is working.

 

John, this may not help - because I don't even know if the sbp2 module is involved in talking to firewire scanners - however, there is a bug filed where external firewire hard drives are not detected until sbp2 is loaded, and sbp2 is not loaded at setup time.

 

I had to force my 2008.0 install to load sbp2 at boot time in order to access my external firewire hdd.

 

If you look through the output of

lsmod|more

and see if sbp2 is loaded,

 

or, easier:

lsmod|grep sbp2

which will return nothing if sbp2 is not loaded

 

then if it isn't, try to

modprobe sbp2

then try to detect your scanner again.

 

Like I said, it may not be relevant, but it's a 2 minute job to try it.

 

If it works, I made the system load sbp2 at each boot by adding the single term

sbp2

on a new line, on its own at the end of the file:

/etc/modprobe.preload

Edited by jimdunn
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On the brighter side John you could have paid big bucks for a new release and that new release broke several of your peripherals causing you to buy new ones just because the suppliers of those peripherals have not updated their software and have no intention of doing so.

I have just been reading that users of windows vista are in that situation now. That would really dent anyone's credibility. Here you get really helpful advice and the willingness to put things right that can be put right. I think that alone is a good selling point for Mandriva and maybe other distros.

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Thanks to jimdunns suggested lines of information I simply added sbp2 as a line item in modprobe-preload. Did nothing else.

Rebooted to be sure it worked and bravo I have the Epson Perfection 2450 Photo Scanner working. Rebooting a few times and works each time

It seems that Mandriva have screwed up somehow. I remember that there used to be references to hotplugging associated with Firewire in 2007-Spring.

I can't find anything associated with hotplugging in 2008. It seems this lack of hotplugging is what causes the Firewire to not be activated or whatever.

 

The lack of sound was weird. I did a number of reboots, about 6, and on one occasion I got sound. So I did many many more and found I still got occasional sound.

Thinking that alsa might be flaky I un-installed what alsa packages I could remove and reinstalled from the net and not from the DVD. It didn't fix anything.

So I went to Cooker and installed all the updated alsa stuff.

 

I now have sound even after a dozen reboots. I don't know which of the alsa packages had the fix but obviously one of them did.

 

Regarding the apparent loss of Glow, that was an oversight on my part. Due to the rearranging of kdeartwork into selectable sections so not everything has to be installed if you really only want a part or parts of it, it caused me to leave out the kdeartwork basic......it had the Glow stuff in it.

 

About the Mouse back button being no longer usable. I followed AdamWs' advice and checked imwheel as he suggested but it gave a funny response

 

5785 ? 00:00:00 imwheel

 

to the ..........[root@localhost john]# ps -e | grep imwheel check.

 

I did try installing the logitech-mouse-common package and also the logitech-applet rpm but when rebooted, during the bootup it gave a load of errors related to udevd and wouldn't complete booting.

 

I did a new install of 2008 and am in it now.

 

I can see I won't be removing 2007-Spring any time soon. 2008..........very disappointing.

 

Cheers. John.

 

 

Thanks Adam for your post......I fell asleep :zzz: :zzz: while I was doing this post so I did not see yours until I had concluded this one.

I realized later that even though the Run Config Tool button is missing that one can still see which driver has been installed and they are correct.

There is just no GUI way of changing if they weren't.

 

Thanks for the Draksound info. That does work. Obviously draksound in MCC doesn't.

 

I think I have everything ??? running correctly ( except the Mouse issue) at the moment so I will use it full time for a while to make sure it is stable.

Cheers. John.

Edited by AussieJohn
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With the sound one... the reason you get it intermittently is that the priority of sound cards is based on the order the drivers register them...

 

If you can, blacklist the module for the one you don't want to use. Thus, the other one will be the only one loading, and will become the default card.

 

As for the mouse.... imwheel shouldnt be needed if it's worked in the past, and I'd be surprised if it did much at all now it's so old. Do any other mice buttons exhibit the behaviour you want AussieJohn (eg wheel click, wheel left/right, other side buttons?)? You could swap them around with xmodmap if so.

 

I'm guessing based on the limited information for both, so I could easily be entirely wrong.

 

James

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iphitus: actually, we use imwheel to handle multiple buttons and have done for several releases. If I kill the imwheel process running on my machine, it stops my back / forward buttons working in Firefox. You have to have *something* to translate these buttons into actual actions that applications will recognize, as most applications aren't written to recognize these extended buttons natively. imwheel is it, for Mandriva.

 

john: the response to the check is actually what I expected (it tells me imwheel is running) but I should actually have asked for this check, sorry:

 

ps aux | grep imwheel

 

it'll tell me the parameters imwheel was launched with, which is important. Also it'd help to see your xorg.conf.

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