Nouveau Nightmares

[Dan]

Ayup. Nouveau is now officially on Dan's poo-poo list. And fairly highly placed on it at that.

Or more to the point, the fact that since F11, fedora defaults to nouveau rather than the old nv driver is on my poo-poo list. What's wrong with that? Well, nothing really ... unless you've got one of those sorry motherboard/video card combinations which chokes on nouveau. <....>

Case in point, the War Department's MSI/AMD Sempron 64 3400+/Gforce FX5200 combination. Several things have combined tonight to put me squarely in the doghouse.

• Her video card decided to barf the innards out of its capacitors. Thusly demanding its replacement with "my" old one. (256mb Gforce FX5200)
  
• The power supply in her box was an older 350 watt non-quiet type. It was dreadfully noisy, thereby demanding it be replaced by my "old" Thermaltake TR2 quiet PSU.
  
• Her HDD was getting quite old, and quite small. Thereby demanding it be replaced with my "old" (extremely low hours) IDE 120gig back-up drive.
  
• F9 was getting awfully long in the tooth. (And, as many of us painfully remember, it wasn't exactly a stellar performer in the first place.) And the final rasher of F9 updates is no longer available. Thereby demanding it be updated with F12, if not F13.

The fast and dirty solution? Why, poke in the "new" PSU, AGP, HDD and OS, of course. Like there was ever a question?


Uh, huh. Seemed like a good idea at the time, anyway. Right up until nouveau decided it was going to turn lock-o-matic anywhere from a few seconds to five minutes after X starts, with the average being closer to three seconds. Completely without any warning, of course. Smack in the middle of fetching info for 500 some-odd updates. ... and locking the machine up tighter than a bull's bum in fly season.

Well, that's a right proper pain in the hind pockets, but not a critical problem. There's always init3 and yum, right?

Uh, huh. Wrong. "Can't resolve repo, "fedora"" or some other such wall-eyed nonsense. Long story short, it couldn't resolve it's own rosey red rump, using both hands, in a hall of mirrors ... at high noon!

...


Grrrrrr!


I'll deal with this miscreant pile of bits and bytes in the morning ... unless I find my MINT 8 disk first.


<....>

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by Dan

Ayup. Nouveau is now officially on Dan's poo-poo list. And fairly highly placed on it at that.

Or more to the point, the fact that since F11, fedora defaults to nouveau rather than the old nv driver is on my poo-poo list. What's wrong with that? Well, nothing really ... unless you've got one of those sorry motherboard/video card combinations which chokes on nouveau. <....>

Case in point, the War Department's MSI/AMD Sempron 64 3400+/Gforce FX5200 combination. Several things have combined tonight to put me squarely in the doghouse.

• Her video card decided to barf the innards out of its capacitors. Thusly demanding its replacement with "my" old one. (256mb Gforce FX5200)
• The power supply in her box was an older 350 watt non-quiet type. It was dreadfully noisy, thereby demanding it be replaced by my "old" Thermaltake TR2 quiet PSU.
• Her HDD was getting quite old, and quite small. Thereby demanding it be replaced with my "old" (extremely low hours) IDE 120gig back-up drive.
• F9 was getting awfully long in the tooth. (And, as many of us painfully remember, it wasn't exactly a stellar performer in the first place.) And the final rasher of F9 updates is no longer available. Thereby demanding it be updated with F12, if not F13.

The fast and dirty solution? Why, poke in the "new" PSU, AGP, HDD and OS, of course. Like there was ever a question?


Uh, huh. Seemed like a good idea at the time, anyway. Right up until nouveau decided it was going to turn lock-o-matic anywhere from a few seconds to five minutes after X starts, with the average being closer to three seconds. Completely without any warning, of course. Smack in the middle of fetching info for 500 some-odd updates. ... and locking the machine up tighter than a bull's bum in fly season.

Well, that's a right proper pain in the hind pockets, but not a critical problem. There's always init3 and yum, right?

Uh, huh. Wrong. "Can't resolve repo, "fedora"" or some other such wall-eyed nonsense. Long story short, it couldn't resolve it's own rosey red rump, using both hands, in a hall of mirrors ... at high noon!

...


Grrrrrr!


I'll deal with this miscreant pile of bits and bytes in the morning ... unless I find my MINT 8 disk first.


<....>

Ok here's some help as your plight made me giggle



Boot up in runlevel 3 then start networking


i.e

su
system-config-network-tui

setup your LAN connection


Then follow my nvidia guide.

[Dan]

Morning, Leigh!

Yeah, that was just about the last thing I tried before I hung my head, tossed in the jockstrap and slunk off to bed last night. I'll admit I was feeling pretty low when I did. That really should have worked. I guess I'll give it another try using eth1 here in a little while, but first I've got to get to where I can find my own backside again. It's 0400 here, so that's either gonna take a lot of coffee, or a little more sleep.

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by Dan

Morning, Leigh!

Yeah, that was just about the last thing I tried before I hung my head, tossed in the jockstrap and slunk off to bed last night. I'll admit I was feeling pretty low when I did. That really should have worked. I guess I'll give it another try using eth1 here in a little while, but first I've got to get to where I can find my own backside again. It's 0400 here, so that's either gonna take a lot of coffee, or a little more sleep.

Do you try

ifup eth1

after setting up LAN

[Dan]

Haven't tried eth1 yet this morning, but I did with eth0 last night. Network looked like it started ok to me, but yum had a different opinion. Just for the giggles of it, I think I'm going to swap out the NIC this morning. My old 3com is pretty bullet-proof, and it's got nothing to do now besides collect dust in the parts bin.

[smr54]

There's an old book, Something of Value--rather racist, even in the time it was written, but it had a good quote, a (probably paraphrased) Bantu proverb

"If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them."

Pulseaudio
Tying sound to consolekit, which is when sound first became problematic in Fedora
Tying networking, sound and other system functions to a GUI
Noveau

The list goes on.

In fairness, other things constantly improve

"N" wireless card support
Asian input managers
Printer support--I no longer refer to CUPS as standing for Can't Usually Print Stuff
Applications that work under Linux

[Dan]

Update - Supplemental:

Event Summary: Critical lesson for today - be careful what you do, when you do it, and who sees you do it.

Event details: After making the last post above, I dragged my sorry rump off to bed again in a somewhat futile attempt to get rid of that stupid-all-over feeling you get when you haven't had enough sleep. I figured I'd get back to this when the odds of fat-fingering something in the dreaded init3 were a bit less.

A couple of hours later, I woke up to a yellow/grey sky punctuated with bright white/blue flashes, and rolling thunder. The War Department was already up. She was sitting in her chair in the living room reading a paperback book, one leg folded across the other, with her ankle rolling so that her toe was making precise slow circles in the air. She didn't look up -- or smile -- when she said, "Good morning."

"Morning. Sleep well?"

"There's fresh coffee in the pot if you need it."

The sleepy-stupids disappeared like a bunny rabbit waking up on a firing range. My marital arts training kicked in instantly. They say it'll save your life someday when you really need it, and they're right. Critical observation here? She said need -- not want.

Now, if you are -- or have ever been -- married, no further explanation is necessary. If you haven't been ... this is sort of like walking into a room to find a half dozen 80% Dupont long sticks wrapped in a bundle, poking out of a birthday cake ... complete with a hissing fuse.

I figured I had about thirty minutes, so I gulped a half cup of scalding hot coffee, and parked my butt in front of her computer. Plenty of time to get dressed later.

First things first, I stabbed the MINT8 LiveCD into the DVD drive, and shoved the drawer home. Reasoning? Simple. Fast and dirty function check. Full Gnome, no Nouveau, and a fast and dirty in-service NIC test.

As expected, MINT8 loaded right up and went to GUI without a hitch, then NM buttoned the NIC into the network in a businesslike fashion, and the box surfed without incident. I was just getting ready to shut down when a voice over my shoulder startled me.

"That's working."

It wasn't a question. "Ayup. Just testing to make sure it isn't a hardware issue."

"Everything check out?"

"Ayup. It's all good. Running cool and clean."

She stood up straight and sipped her coffee. "Good." She pointed to the screen. "I like this. Fedora wasn't working?"

"No. It's going to need a little tweaking to get it up and running."

Her eyes narrowed a bit, and I realized I'd missed something very important. "This is working," she repeated. Again, not a question. Then her arms folded across her chest. "Working is good. I like this."

What could I do? "Yes, ma'am," I muttered ... and clicked the "Install Mint to Hard Drive" icon.




<....>

[Hlingler]

Just my gut feeling, but I think that your first mistake was trying to put Fedora on this woman's PC.
That based on "This is working. "Working is good. I like this." being her expected reaction.

2¢
V

[Dan]

Oh, I think she'd have been perfectly happy with fedora ... if it hadn't gone all Microsoft® on us during the initial setup after install. <....>

[Hlingler]

I predict that she'll be happy with Mint. My meager experience in this area so far suggests that it is drop-dead easy and simple for anyone who wants stuff to Just Work™©®, and there does not appear to be any other similar choice.

My virus-prone friend is still tooling along quite happily after about two months with Mint8.

V

[Dan]

I'm thinking she's gonna be happy with it. Especially if I keep my golden screwdriver and magic mouse the heck out of it. Not that I'm likely to reach for it anyway. Methinks there's a fair risk of jerking back a bloody stub if I do. <....>


<....>

[Dan]

Update:

Well, MINT 8 just keeps chugging along. Once I beat PulseAudio into submission by installing everything else under the sun beneath it, there's been no problems, no drama. I can't really hold the PA crud against it. Had to do the same things to my F11 (and F13) installs.

The War Department watches movies when she wants, plays her music at will, GIMPs, OOos, freecells, Scribuses, Pinguses, surfs and emails without care and generally uses her box ... rather than struggling with it.

Needless to say, she finds this concept strangely attractive. Ergo, the Minty green freshness of that box is clear for the foreseeable future.


The Other Shoe Falls


So, last night, in preparation for some possible travel, we dug her HP dv6-1240us laptop out of the desk drawer. Time to charge the battery and do the update thing.

It went to desktop easily enough, and popped up the mandatory "Kernel Oops" message right on schedule. However, also right on schedule, it did so in silence. This particular laptop has been a fedora problem child. F11 pops kernel crashes, F12 wouldn't even boot without altering boot lines to work around chipset issues (intel) and -- as I was about to discover a little later -- F13 pops kernel poops too, just like every other fedora spin/release/etc. since F11.

Anyway, hoping for a fix for both sound issues and kernel oopses, I ran the entire gauntlet of 266 updates, including a new kernel. Damn near an hour later, I rebooted the thing and was greeted with ...

Silence.

And thirty seconds into user GUI ... a kernel oops.

Some things are entirely predictable. I heard the comment in my head several seconds before it came in over the transom from my right rear flank. I did however, underestimate the sarcasm with which the actual words dripped.

"Yeah. That worked."

I already had the CD box opened and the MINT9 64 bit disk in my fingers when the other shoe came down.

"Have we tried MINT in this thing, yet?"

Five minutes later, when that stubborn HP/Intel driven bugger came to an Oops-less GUI ... amid the glorious twinkle-dink of the standard Gnome start-up jingle, the battle was lost. A moment later when it informed us there was a one-click proprietary driver available to get the wireless off the ground ... the war was over, too.


...



So, that's it for the War Department. I now live in a house divided. On one side of the office, there is the icy-blue complex aloofness of a fedora powered experience, on the other, the happy mint-julep-y aroma of a completely satisfied customer experience.

There's probably an abject life-lesson hidden in there somewhere, but I have no desire to see it. I'm still far to deeply immersed in my deep blue delusion to care much for such bitter fruits of reality.

It's fedora, dammit! It's LINUX! It's Redhat on training wheels! It's worth it! it should be a pain-in-the- ...

...

Aw, CRUD! I need another cup of coffee. I don't think I like the soft green glow on the horizon to whence that train of thought was chugging.





<....>