I’m pretty new with both linux OS and OpenSUSE. I start to learn how to use it, and I’m often blocked with configuration and various understanding. By the way, I’m often unblocked with forums, etc.
Now, I have an issue which makes me nervous :
When I watch a video on Youtube, using Firefox, at the end of almost all videos, the screen goes black, and the display totally disappears, definitively. I still can have access to Ctrl+Alt+F1…F6 terminals, but when I come back to Ctrl+Alt+F7 desktop, the screen still black.
There is no error message displayed, no crash window, the screen becomes black instantaneously.
I’m on a Lenovo T400 laptop, OpenSUSE 13.1.10, Firefox 37.0.2 using the HTML5 youtube player.
I don’t know how to get any error log. I don’t know how to interpretate dmesg log (for me nothing is abnormal).
So I would like to know how to force KDE to restart on the desktop ? Each times I try to launch it, I have an error message saying “$DISPLAY is not set or cannot connect to the X server”. I tried following commands :
kdeinit4
startkde
In addition, I don’t know if restarting KDE is well what I have to do to unblock me. As now, the only solution I have is to reboot my laptop.
To restart KDE when it gets locked or seem unresponsive you could try ALT+CTR+BACKSPACE twice (press BACKSPACE twice while holding ALT+CTR).
That said, if it’s the X server that crashed I don’t think this would help. First thing I’d do is check if the video driver(s) is(are) correctly installed and functional.
Also try Chrome (or Chromium) and see if the same thing happens.
Question: what do you mean by OpenSUSE 13.1.10? I know only of openSUSE 13.1 and openSUSE 13.2.
Thanks, I will try to do what you propose. I also suspect something about the video card driver. I’ll try with Konqueror and/or Chromium.
What is the X server ?
For the OpenSUSE version, I pasted here the version number which appears in YaST Control Center > Support > Release Notes :
“Notes de version d’openSUSE 13.1
Version: 13.1.10 (2014-01-08)”
I use Youtube to get a music playlist at work, so I don’t care about the video. For now I get around the problem by installing XBMC (kodi media center) with the Youtube plugin…
Roughly, it’s the low level graphics part of linux, that supply the basic graphics support so your desktop can “talk” with your video driver. Or something like that. Google linux X server ou openSUSE X server and you’ll see.
That’s the release notes version, not the distro release version. You can see that in Yast Online Update, search for “release” (without quotes) and click the versions tab.
When you say “direct video”, do you talk about the “graphic hardware acceleration” ? If yes, I’m currently trying without (it was enabled by default). Let’s say in a couple of hours.
About the requested video card information :
Video chip : Intel mobile 4 series chipset (Dev. ID=76354)
Driver : i915
When disabling the Firefox hardware acceleration, the issue is slightly different : the bug is always random (occurs approx. 3 time over 4), but the screen does not become black, the logon screen appears suddently, and when I log-on the desktop reload itself, like a computer-startup. I think this is KDE which restarts itself.
[nb. sorry for my English writing, I don’t know if I’m clear here, some translations are not obvious for me]
I also get the problem 1 time in the middle of a video. It really looks like to an unstable video driver. I did not install manually anything, I trusted what SUSE asked me to install on the first boot (including all updates).
there are too many hardware permutations just to say T-400 http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T400
but it sounds to me you’re running out if ram.
I’m not sure what graphic card you have but some open sourced drivers are not as good as the propitiatory ones mostly because the hardware makers don’t show what’s under the hood.
What to do?
see if there is a propitiatory driver available for your hardware, if running out of ram disable kde’s aye candy, and do avoid HD video’s as they use up a lot of resources unless you have hardware acceleration on, in which case still avoid it as mobile graphic cards don’t have their own memory but use ram’s
I learn how to find X11 logs, and there is a trace of graphic driver crash, like we was thinking about. At the end of the last log (/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old) I found :
8998.464] (EE)
8998.464] (EE) Backtrace:
8998.465] (EE) 0: /usr/bin/Xorg (xorg_backtrace+0x3d) [0x58612d]
8998.465] (EE) 1: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x189e99) [0x589e99]
8998.465] (EE) 2: /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x7f884f99d000+0xf9f0) [0x7f884f9ac9f0]
8998.465] (EE) 3: /lib64/libc.so.6 (memset+0x54) [0x7f884e8752b4]
8998.465] (EE) 4: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so (0x7f884a7df000+0x3c5bb) [0x7f884a81b5bb]
8998.465] (EE) 5: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so (0x7f884a7df000+0x3f506) [0x7f884a81e506]
8998.465] (EE) 6: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so (0x7f884a7df000+0x9319b) [0x7f884a87219b]
8998.465] (EE) 7: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so (0x7f884a7df000+0x95026) [0x7f884a874026]
8998.466] (EE) 8: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so (0x7f884a7df000+0x7a221) [0x7f884a859221]
8998.466] (EE) 9: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x10c973) [0x50c973]
8998.466] (EE) 10: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x3d0ce) [0x43d0ce]
8998.466] (EE) 11: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x2c56a) [0x42c56a]
8998.466] (EE) 12: /lib64/libc.so.6 (__libc_start_main+0xf5) [0x7f884e811be5]
8998.466] (EE) 13: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x2c8b1) [0x42c8b1]
8998.466] (EE)
8998.466] (EE) Segmentation fault at address 0x7f883f3a6008
8998.467] (EE)
Fatal server error:
8998.467] (EE) Caught signal 11 (Segmentation fault). Server aborting
8998.467] (EE)
8998.467] (EE)
Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support
at http://wiki.x.org
for help.
8998.467] (EE) Please also check the log file at “/var/log/Xorg.0.log” for additional information.
8998.467] (EE)
8998.467] (II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch
8998.474] (EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.
I don’t think it’s a RAM issue because I have a monitor (gkrellm), and when crash occurs, the memory usage is around 800MB over 2G, so ~60% still free (without swap). The issue comes with HD but also with very low quality video streams (like 144p or 240p).
In Firefox, the player used is the HTML5, so no flash issue here. I will try to use Konqueror and also try to go on other video strem websites.
In any case, how can I search alternatives driver for graphic cards over Suse ? Is there some database websites existing or something like this ?
Or try to uninstall the package libvdpau_va_gl1. This is known to cause problems for some (intel) users.
There is no alternative driver for your card.
The only option would be to install a newer version of the intel driver and Xorg/Mesa, and maybe the kernel as well as part of the intel driver is included there.
I don’t have libvdpau_va_gl1, but libvdpau1, which seems to be slightly different. Anyway, as of my chipset is not nvidia, I removed it. For now i’m testing with the UXA mode. Wait and see…
Well, libvdpau_va_gl1 is a “driver” for libvdpau1 that redirects VDPAU to VA-API (which is supported by intel). So if you didn’t have it installed, you should try to install it instead.
This makes hardware decoding using VDPAU work on intel systems.
I just suggested removing it because other people had problems with it (not with libvdpau1).
If the used player supports VA-API (libva1) directly, uninstalling libvdapu1 is ok though.
For now i’m testing with the UXA mode. Wait and see…
Have you tried whether uninstalling libvdapu1 alone helped?
Then it wouldn’t be necessary to switch to UXA. And if your problem was VDPAU related, this wouldn’t help anyway I think.
Yes, I undo my changes concerning the UXA this morning.
Thank you for your explanations. When removing libvdpau1 (0.6.3.1.3 x86_64), the Yast software manager automatically installed me the libvdpau1-32bit (0.6.3.1.3 x86_64). So it seems to be exactly the same version. But regarding the fact it solved the issue I had, there was probably a little difference.
Thank you for your explanations. When removing libvdpau1 (0.6.3.1.3 x86_64), the Yast software manager automatically installed me the libvdpau1-32bit (0.6.3.1.3 x86_64).
Well, then it is not at all a good idea to uninstall it. Some packages on your system require it, so YaST installs the 32bit version instead to satisfy those requirements.
So it seems to be exactly the same version. But regarding the fact it solved the issue I had, there was probably a little difference.
The 32bit version cannot be used or even loaded by 64bit applications, so it is not really there at all now in practice.
Apparently the applications you use still work without being able to load libvdpau1, but some others might just crash on startup.
So I would really recommend to install it (the 64bit version) again. And as mentioned, install libvdpau_va_gl1 as well, this would hopefully fix your original problem. If not, removing it would probably be a “solution”, but a rather hacky one.
For the moment I use this computer almost only as a music player and also for helping me into developping and testing scripts which have to be deployed in embedded environments. So I use only 4 or 5 applications.
Regarding libvdpau_va_gl1, it does not appears in the search list when I search for “libvdpau”. Googling it, I found that website RPM resource libvdpau_va_gl1 but I don’t understand how to find the associated repo which I should add to Yast. And there is results for Suse 13.2 but not for 13.1.
On 13.1 it is not yet available, it should be installed by default on 13.2 on intel systems.
But if it is not installed, libvdpau1 should just not be used at all (on intel) I believe… (because no suitable “driver” is available)
Hm, at least the switch to UXA actually does apply to 13.1 most, as the intel driver in 13.1 seems to have problems with SNA on a lot of chipsets.
Maybe this actually does fix your problem even with libvdpau1 installed?
I cannot tell, you have to try or choose your preferred solution yourself.
In fact, today it started again to crash after I tried to install the libvdpau_va_gl1 by entering the Suse 13.2 repository (ok it’s a DIY patch…).
Next week I’ll come back to the first solution of UXA method, after uninstalling libvdpau_va_gl1. I think this is the more stable fix. As I previously said, I can’t fully uninstall the libvdpau1 because when I remove the 32 bits version, it adds the 64 bits version. And vice-versa.
Well, that’s to be expected I suppose. 13.2’s libvdpau_va_gl1 probably does not work at all on 13.1, because it has completely different versions of libvdpau1, libva1, and even Xorg/Mesa.
I hope you didn’t add the 13.2 repo to your system. If yes, remove it immediately again or you’ll upgrade to 13.2 by mistake when installing updates (and most likely not even completely, thus breaking your system).
Yes, if it helps, that’s the preferred “fix”.
And it affects all graphic related things, not just hardware decoding/playing back of video files.
If you ever upgrade to a later openSUSE version, you should probably try to switch back to SNA though, for performance reasons (and I have read reports from people with intel graphics that experienced the exact opposite, i.e. UXA crashed in particular in combination with GNOME).
As I previously said, I can’t fully uninstall the libvdpau1 because when I remove the 32 bits version, it adds the 64 bits version. And vice-versa.
As I wrote already, some packages on your system require libvdpau1 (on my system that’s Xine, DirectFB, GStreamer, MPlayer, and ffmpeg, so pretty much all video players except VLC).
But if you only have the 32bit version installed, it’s practically the same as having it not installed at all…
Oops… :shame: I did it, the time for me to get this library. I already removed the repo after uninstalling the lib. It’s not a problem. If it breaks my system, it would be a good way to memorize from my mistakes ! I’m not affraid by several reinstallations.
I’m currently testing, and until now, no crash occurs. Crossing my fingers !
Check the settings in
‘Kickoff Application Launcher’ (click on the chameleon in the lower left corner of the screen)’ > ‘Configure Desktop’ > ‘Display and Monitor’ > ‘Screen Locker’.
If you watch your youtube videos for a time longer than given there, then this could explain your problem.