Trying to setup icon size in Desktop Settings for KDE4 in 11.2. I hit OK and it goes to the X11 sign-in kdm. I tried kdm4 and kdm3 and failsafe sign-on to not effect.
BTW Yast is missing graphics card setup. Is this the new norm?
Yes you can still run sax2 from the command line if need be.
Please, don’t suggest the usage of sax2 anymore. It creates an xorg.conf which in 9 out of 10 times conflicts with autodetection and -configuration.
Trouble like this usually lies in videocards without propr. driver, and/or mixing KDE4 packages from different repos.
@johnswolter: what is the videocard?
It creates an xorg.conf which in 9 out of 10 times conflicts with autodetection and -configuration.
Sorry, but I disagree. One should use the default first and let HAL try to detect the needed devices, but it’s good to have a fallback in case HAL fails. Autodetection works very well on my system (including Composite etc.), but I have seen HAL being unable to set the driver, frequency, monitor sizes or whatever correctly when using other hardware, and in these cases a xorg.conf as created by SaX2 or nvidia-xconfig can still be very useful. Also I haven’t seen settings being done in the xorg.conf conflicting with the automatic detection yet - and even if they occur, I tend to think a xorg.conf is worth a try, since it can always be removed when not working properly.
Knurpht wrote:
>
> Please, don’t suggest the usage of sax2 anymore. It creates an xorg.conf
> which in 9 out of 10 times conflicts with autodetection and
> -configuration.
>
> Trouble like this usually lies in videocards without propr. driver,
> and/or mixing KDE4 packages from different repos.
>
> @johnswolter: what is the videocard?
Sounds like a good idea, but what happens when the auto-setup barfs on your
card or gets it wrong? I have an older Nvidia 6100 setup here that refuses
to install properly - sticks at 640x480 and even the nvidia-setup can’t
change it. Sax2 writes xorg.conf, I add a couple of feature definitions
that it misses, and off I go - a happy camper. In all the years I spent
designing automatic control systems I never let one out of the shop that
didn’t have provisions for an over-ride input capability. The ability to
automatically configure has the implicit correlary ability to automatically
screw up.
In this particular case, the root cause is the inability of hal to scan the
Nvidia smbus due to an APIC conflict but conflict it does. Without sax2, it
makes a useless lump out of a perfectly good machine.
–
Will Honea
I agree auto detection is all well and good but there must be an override mechanism. Except for xorg.conf I see no way to veto or change HAL’s choices.
Interesting discussion about the possible choices. My long experience suggests to me to somehow go back to the desktop defaults that were installed with 11.2’s upgrade. I’m guessing I could add the few desktop icons for Firefox, Quanta, MySQL admin, and a few more back onto the desktop once it is returned to the default.
Maybe the next item to look at is to wipe-out HAL’s previous detection and then just reboot to gain a new auto-configuration.
I think hardware auto-detect is a good idea. However it has taken M$ several years to get it working and it is still not working at an A- level. Give HAL a few more years of work.
Finally, as far as the graphics card details, the computer is a few years old Dell. I’ll get the service tag number string, go to the Dell support site, and extract whatever technical data they are willing to share.
I don’t know if reading the chip model on the systemboard is all that helpful. Engineers are always adding a feature with some external logic array making it undetetable and non-standard. ATI was famous for that. It kills HAL auto detect.
Cheers.