Mixed success with 12.1 beta on 3 machines

martin_helm · October 19, 2011, 4:09pm

Yesterday I found some time to look at 12.1 beta on real hardware (not only
in vbox what I checked at the weekend).

I ran the Gnome Live CD on the Eee PC (see footer) and an Asus K50IJ
notebook (3GB RAM) which has Intel GM 45 graphics.
Both systems run trouble free with live usb media, graphics hardware
acceleration works on both (the first runs flawless with noveau and shows
gallium 0.4 in glxinfo). Effects work (no gnome3 fallback mode). Wlan (Eee
PC has RTL8191SEvA, for which a had to install extra packages with 11.4 to
make it work) on both works out of the box also sound.

I tried then on my PC (Dell Vostro 460, see footer) which was a less
pleasant experience. Here I installed to a spare partitition.
When installer tried to reboot it just hung after waitig a long time a had
to power off to reboot and grub went to nirwana.
I repaired grub and booted 12.1 - gdm starts fine when logging in Gnome 3
goes to fallback mode but starts, looking at glxinfo noveau is used but only
with “software rasterizer” no gallium. Moving a window leads to garbage
(looks like the noise on old TV when you had no valid channel).
Downloaded nvidia driver 285.05.09 disabled kvm and installed it the hard
way. The proprietary driver works flawless so far but suddenly gdm was no
longer able to show the login dialog. Switched it to kdm which worked.
Login from kdm to gnome3 session works without going to fallback mode an
everything seems fine.
The other thing which did not work at all is that wired network on this
machine did not work while installing and did not work after the
installation finished, looking into yast a generic entry Ethernet was
created without any settings but also an entry for the Broadcom Corporation
NetLink BCM57788 Gigabit Ethernet PCI which simply was not enabled. Deleting
the dummy entry and configuring the real network adapter solved that.
I installed also KDE (directly from yast as a second DE) afterwards on the
PC to check that later.

So far 2 full success stories and 1 fail (not completely so far everything
could be solved by hand with a little tweaking).

I did not test flash and videoplayers until now but will post again when I
have done that.

A general comment on Gnome 3 (though I am a die hard KDE user), it is not
that bad as I thought. I certainly will not use it on my PC but consider to
switch my netbook to it when 12.1 is released at least as second DE beside
KDE.

Last comment: I cannot stand this new light/yellow green, sorry.

dth2 · October 19, 2011, 8:19pm

with you on the new super bright green,

martin_helm · October 19, 2011, 9:21pm

Another system I quickly tested which works without any troubleshooting
(also 12.1 beta Gnome 3 live):

Dell precision M6300 with Nvidia Quadro FX 3600M, 4GB RAM (3 years old). It
is my laptop for my job.
Everything works out of the box (wlan, bluetooth, sound, hardware
accelerated graphics with noveau/gallium).
Tested flash on it with a 1080p youtube video (the laptop is 17inch with
1920x1200 native resolution), no artefacts and completely smooth streaming
with the high resolution. Only (very small) glitch I could find is if I take
a window and shake it or move it fast I can see some small artefacts while I
move it at the vertical borders for while the movement is fast.
Noveau improved a lot I have to say.

So now it is 3:1 pass/fail ratio no longer only 2:1

I have to investigate again the PC where the trouble happened if I can
reproduce everything which went wrong to file bugs for that (but also that
ended yesterday with a working system it was just somewhat about half an
hour additional troubleshooting, but for someone who is completely new it
would have been a disaster/show blocker).

briandoe · October 20, 2011, 3:18am

I wonder if that’s related to a problem I ran into when I tried installing fglrx on my ATI-equipped system following the directions I found here, where the system would boot all the way to gdm, but the only thing that would display was the gdm backdrop and an eternal “busy” pointer. I didn’t try loading kdm.

Not quite sure what you’re referring to here. I didn’t see anything that was light/yellow green. The only real green thing I saw was the default backdrop, which slowly changes to grey a few hours after sunset.

martin_helm · October 20, 2011, 3:34am

briandoe wrote:
> martin_helm;2395217 Wrote:
>> Last comment: I cannot stand this new light/yellow green, sorry.
> Not quite sure what you’re referring to here.

grub and bootsplash screen colors

briandoe · October 20, 2011, 5:26am

Ah, okay. I don’t really pay much attention to them. Yes, they’re really, really green. It could be worse though. It could be bright magenta.

briandoe · October 20, 2011, 5:31am

So, I just tried to install fglrx again, using a different repository and set of instructions, here, and got the same thing: gdm that won’t load up the login dialog, just an eternal “busy” pointer. Attempting to remove fglrx per the instructions here resulted in a completely unbootable system. Thankfully, I took a drive image before I started messing around, so I simply restored off my image.

martin_helm · October 20, 2011, 12:09pm

briandoe wrote:

>
> briandoe;2395355 Wrote:
>> I wonder if that’s related to a problem I ran into when I tried
>> installing fglrx on my ATI-equipped system following the directions I
>> found ‘here’ (http://tinyurl.com/3dc9ygp), where the system would boot
>> all the way to gdm, but the only thing that would display was the gdm
>> backdrop and an eternal “busy” pointer. I didn’t try loading kdm.So, I
>> just tried to install fglrx again, using a different repository
> and set of instructions, ‘here’ (http://en.opensuse.org/Fglrx), and got
> the same thing: gdm that won’t load up the login dialog, just an eternal
> “busy” pointer. Attempting to remove fglrx per the instructions ‘here’
> (http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:ATI_troubleshooting) resulted in a
> completely unbootable system. Thankfully, I took a drive image before I
> started messing around, so I simply restored off my image.
>
>
I hope I will find some time this evening to look into the gdm problem
again. Maybe it is a similar problem somehow related to the proprietary
driver (maybe its something completely different, who knows).
Ii I can find something out, I will post it.