Done playing with 11.3

English Soapbox
1

Not exactly a “rant” of any sort. I just wanted to let Stakanov know I’m done playing with installing 11.3…I’ve tried everything under the sun to get past the “loading basic drivers” hang with no success. I even got so wild with the bios I not only had to use the jumper to reset but had to pull the battery and cut the power for 10 minutes to get it to boot again…whew…:stuck_out_tongue: That being said…don’t worry I’ll still post my hardware config for the 11.1 HCL list. :wink:

That being said, I’m not touching 11.3 with a 10 ft pole. Between the install hangs, green screens, blank screens, ext4 corruption and general Xorg noveau whackiness I’ll wait until 11.4 thank you very much.

Oh, FYI…I even went so far as to hook up a different 17 inch CRT and try both the DVD and LiveCD again thinking maybe it had some detection issues or somesuch. The DVD failed in the usual spot but the LiveCD caused a message of “out of range” after it went blank. Both Vsync and Hsync were about 15 hz too high. 30-50 was 65 hz and the 90 to 160 was 174 hz. My problem with the DVD is still the sata_sil…if that loads then it’ll boot through to the installation screens…whether or not I’d have decent video when I finished is anyones guess…>:)

2

had the same problem with SLED 10 but SLED 11 was fine.

3

You were really lucky it didn’t explode, it did everything else possible. Goo luck next time.

4

Yup…I love my machine. When I build em I make them tough…lol!. My wife actually still uses a dos box I built somewhere around 94 for her ancient court reporting software. I’m amazed that thing still runs…It still has my very first install of linux on it too…

5

Alright…now I’m gonna rant a little bit. Apparently KDE changed significantly from 11.1…the d**n noveau driver and detection, sax2 is gone, the file system was apparently changed to ext4 which has caused problems…etc…etc…shouldn’t 11.2 have been 12.0 for no other reason than to warn us of upcoming nasties? I read somewhere that “the kernel doesn’t change” for each cycle…10, 11, etc…but apparently everything else is fair game. Even when the kernel is apparently known to be buggy…I’m running 2.6.27.48-0.2-default…doesn’t make much sense to me…

Check my sig…I’m running kde 4 and proprietary Nvidia drivers here with no problem…even the original “nv” was slow but stable…it shoulda stayed that way throughout the 11 series…along with everything else…save your big changes for a major release please…

6

You know what Linus says about penguins…

The second quote is from when Linus announced Linux v2.0 on Usenet:

Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
-- Linus Torvalds

So what’s the chance of getting my status changed to “Angry Penguin”? lol!

7

Good luck for 11.4. I hope that will work for you

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This has always been my issue with OpenSUSE. They upgraded to a RC-level X.Org server back in 10.3 (IIRC) and it completely broke the Proprietary ATI drivers for no gain.

That X.Org server was buggy as hell, crashing all over the place, and sending people to terminal logins.

There were lots of people who actually went through the trouble to downgrade to the previous version of X.Org.

Can prolly google some horror stories.

That’s unfortunate, because the distro itself is a feast for the eyes (both KDE and GNOME, although KDE is a bit Vista-ish but I can’t really complain about that :stuck_out_tongue: ). They just need to make sure they QA these System Components before they push them to people. I don’t really care about applications. I tend to use Official/Proprietary things (like Sun JRE, Skype, Chrome/Opera, Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash/Air) so I can just uninstall or not use them (I do most of my “work” on Windows, though). I do care about system components and unstable Desktop Environments, though, since those CAN render the system borderline unusable.

9

Just a few problems I encountered while doing a clean 11.3 install the other day.
I’ve also tried to upgrade a few months back, did zypper dup, got a black screen and couldn’t get nvidia driver to work no matter what.
Note that I’ve done KMS fix, blacklist nouveau and nomodeset, it didn’t help at the time.
This time it worked a little bit better but still far from 11.2 perfection.

Managed to get nvidia installer working, no black screen, but this time I’ve found that kdm (4.5.3) freezes at login & makes the mouse cursor stuck for about 30sec.
It looks like it’s using full processor power on login, no idea why, but everything slows down at this point.
I’ve found that clearing /home/user/.kde and /tmp fixes this problem for a couple of logins but it comes back after a while.
Also, when booting into runlevel 3 and manually doing startx, this problem doesn’t exist.
Glxgears hangs about 10sec on start, high cpu usage but after that it works fine.
Used nvidia bins 256.53 and 260.19.12.

Updated 2.6.34 kernel seems to be working a lot better than the livecd one that shipped by default.
The “resource piix4_smbus conflicts with ACPI region SOR1” problem that I have on 11.2 doesn’t exist on 11.3 and I suppose that’s good news.
Boot also seems a bit faster, until it gets to startx.

While 11.2 sound (5.1) works by default without aditional alsa or pulseaudio packages(got only libasound2, libpulse0, libpulse-mainloop-glib0 and phonon+xine) 11.3 caused serious issues.
There is noise from the speakers, twice on boot, once on login (kmix) and everytime a sound file is started or stopped.
Some kind of strange noise, like the one that normally happens everytime I switch the speaker power on, only louder.

Thought installing alsa packages and troubleshooting would help me but it turns out it only made things worse. Installing pulseaudio packages didn’t help either.
After the reboot, the noise became distorted, not a “power on” noise anymore but something similar to radio static, when the frequency is wrong.

Removing the alsa packages and pulseaudio completely killed the sound, even though it worked without them before.
Kmix just showed 1 channel, and moving the volume slider caused static. Couldn’t get the 5.1 setup back after that.

It’s not the first time I managed to destroy a system like that, but this was really fast, didn’t last a day.
I suspect my cheap hardware is not supported by default and I have no time to troubleshoot things that work fine on 11.2.
Felt more like a downgrade for me, therefore I’m staying on 11.2 for a while, should have listened to oldcpu when he once said :
“Don’t upgrade the stable system if everything works for you” or something similar.