Mandriva 2008 on Toshiba P100-188 Problems

[Guest distrohopper]

This is going to be a long intro :-( but please bear with me?

 

I have been using Linux for 7 years now. I think I originally started with Mandrake, but moved over to SuSE somewhere on the line. As my username implies, I like to test different distros. I was very impressed with Mandrake at one stage and paid my dues, and I am on the Mandriva mailing list. Then... the Penguin got big yellow stars for eyes, and I opted out.

 

I had an ancient Compaq running SuSE, and it was stolen, so with the insurance payout I bought a Toshiba notebook, an impressive machine, Harmon Kardon speakers :-) It came preinstalled with XP media centre, and so I dual booted into many variants of Linux ( I still need Windows for my bookkeeping program), and with each and every distro same problem, no sound on the Linux side. I tried Ubuntu, Sabayon, SuSE, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mint, etc., etc. No sound.... Until SuSE 10.3, Eureka!

 

Now having tried all the other distros, I had sound, but I was very disappointed with SuSE installation of new programs. Plus I have this personal rule that I may not use the same distro on two Machines. So I did some Googling and found that Mandriva 2008 also supports this Toshiba.

 

So I installed it, as a dual-boot, I was impressed, in fact, so impressed, that I didn't go into the Windows side for two weeks! I had sound :-), I had installed VNC, so accessed my office PC for the bookkeeping program, I installed Windows using virtual box, and if I needed to do anything locally on Windows, I could.

 

I was so impressed that I decided I no longer needed a dual-boot. Why must I have Windows there? Every time I went into "the dark side" , I felt obliged to update Windows, AVAST, AdAware, SpyBot.

 

Mandriva rocks!

 

So.... I reformatted. One partition for the O/S and one for data. I set up a perfect NB :-)

 

Using Compiz I could flick between my office PC using VNC, I could access any Windows application using VirtualBox, and I had sound. All the eye-candy worked fine :-)

 

Then Yesterday morning, all went belly-up. There were updates, so I accepted them. All went fine. Shut down the NB, took it to work, booted up, no title bars, no compiz, no mutliple desktops, no keyboard functions?

 

I think there is a xorg.conf problem?

 

I have reinstalled, but I am cat-foot about doing the updates.

 

Ideas please????

[adamw]

There was a mistake with the second recent kernel update (2.6.22.12-1mdv): the external kernel modules (things like NVIDIA and ATI drivers) were not updated at the same time. So when you updated the kernel, you lost all that stuff. Sounds to me like you lost your NVIDIA driver, causing all this trouble. Mandriva will have automatically switched over to the free 'nv' driver, which doesn't do 3D acceleration, so of course Compiz is broken, causing all the other stuff.

 

We've now uploaded the updated drivers. The 'metapackages' which cause them to be automatically updated still don't seem to have been updated, so you may not see the updated driver if you run MandrivaUpdate, but you should be able to install it manually via rpmdrake already (it's likely that the package you want is nvidia-current-kernel-2.6.22.12-desktop-1mdv-100.14.19-1mdv2008.0 , but you may be running the 'desktop586' or 'laptop' kernel instead). If you installed the kernel update and that package before rebooting, everything should work fine.

 

Or you could just wait a few days before updating, and when you do the update, make sure NVIDIA packages as well as the kernel are updated.

 

As I mentioned, this *is* all meant to be handled in such a way that you don't have to do anything special, but unfortunately it got screwed up this time. The kernel and security teams are working together to ensure this does not happen again with future kernel updates. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[ADDn00b]

Hi Adamw,

I posted the following on another board, but found more information here and thought perhaps you might give a complete n00b simple directions to fix the issue. (I sorta get what you said in the above quote, but, my machine hasn't been able to initialize the Control Center yet...10 minutes and counting, so I am not even sure where I would download or install the driver needed.)

 

From the other forum:

I don't know what has happened, so I will try to describe it as best I can.

Everything was fine this morning as I used my computer in the regular fashion. After updating Mandriva 2008 via the automatic update thingy that is on the top panel (big red exclamation point if you are not up to date), I went about my usual business, and when through, I shut down the computer. After returning home this afternoon and booting up again, I find several issues:

The computer is unbelieveably slow...my dual core processor running above 75% on both cores.

The appearance is choppy and wobbly...even on the startup screen. It looks chunky instead of the usual smooth gradients. I am guessing this is something to do with my graphics card and the update?

The other thing I noticed was an additional entry in GRUB. Among the other "laptop" choices recently added to the list is "laptop 2.6.22.12.1" I don't know if I got the decimal points right but that is the correct numerical sequence.

Anybody have any ideas what the heck happened? I can't use my computer like this. Even typing in a text box is taking forever.

Hair on fire while screen flashes and wiggles.

__________________

 

My Specs from my signature line:

Clevo D900K by XtremeNotebooks.com

AMD 64X2 Dual Core 4200+ 2.20GHz

1024MB 400MHz DDR RAM (2DIMMS)

nVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 Ultra PCI-E with 256MB DDR3 VideoRAM

2 80GB SATA 150 HDD 7200 RPM// 17" WSXGA+ LCD

8X24X10X24 DVD/CDRW Combo Drive and 8X DVD±R/RW Burner

802.11G 54Mbps Mini PCI Internal// Internal Digital/Analog TV Tuner for Windows XP// Built-In Digital Video Camera and a 7 in 4 Flash Card Reader

 

Thank you in advance for your help.