Hi, I started using OpenSuSE 13.2 a couple of months ago and it has been fantastic – but I just have one little problem. I use the Chromium browser, and any time I attempt to play a video, it fails to play, and the window manager seems to completely lose it. All the windows lose their borders and decorations, and all the workspaces collapse into one so all the windows are superimposed. Most bizarrely, if I log out and in again, the problem persists, even though this restarts the window manager! The only way back is to restart the computer.
It’s a late 2007 Macbook with Intel GMA950 graphics. I have an extra external monitor. I’m running 64-bit SuSE. Videos play fine in Firefox. Anything else I should mention? Happy to give any further info to help find the problem.
Any chance you could post your /var/log/Xorg.0.log and .xsession-errors-:0 (it’s a file in your home directory, hidden by default) to http://paste.opensuse.org/ - Remember to remove any personal information and just copy around the time the system failure happened - there might be a lot of text in the xsession errors.
What came to mind; are these videos HTML5 or Flash based? If Flash based, have you tried right clicking on Flash and disabling Hardware Acceleration?
Will get these files posted soon.
It may also be relevant that during startup I get the message: i915 0000:00:02.0: Invalid ROM contents
This also appears in dmesg.log
However, any discussions I have found about this message imply that it normally aborts startup.
It’s all videos, including Youtube videos. How do I tell if they are HTML5 or Flash?
Where do I right click on Flash?
I’ve been using Linux for 18 years, and Flash has always been a nightmare.
You can thank Adobe for that. Anyway just browse to any website with a Flash application and right click in the window where it plays - it’ll save the settings.
Okay, as far as I can tell this is an HTML5 issue, as trying to play a Flash video gives me the ‘You need to install the plugin’ message (even though it is installed from the repository).
I’ve uploaded the files you asked for after playing this to cause the problem. /var/log/Xorg.0.log is at http://paste.opensuse.org/93681680 (there were messages asking me to include dmesg and /sys/class/drm/card0/error, which I did) and .xsession-errors-:0 is at http://paste.opensuse.org/60812785
More info…normally, Chromium in Ubuntu on the same machine plays videos OK, but does not support WebGL, which works fine on Chromium in Suse. However, if you start Chromium in Ubuntu with the --disable-gpu-sandbox switch, then WebGL runs OK, but playing videos causes bizarre desktop behaviour which is not fixed by restarting Xorg, i.e., similar to what I reported above. I have not reported this to Ubuntu because starting Chromium with the --disable-gpu-sandbox switch causes a big orange banner warning of instability to appear in the browser.
Yet another possibly relevant fact – I am booting in EFI mode rather than the BIOS-compatibility mode that would be normal if Linux were installed as part of a Bootcamp setup, though I guess that should be obvious from the logs. Problem may be down to the Macbook’s old EFI1.0 firmware cf. most new PCs running UEFI 2.1. Will try Bootcamp-style startup to see if behaviour changes…
