openSuse 11.2 radeonhd lockups

[crumja]

Oh, and distribution wise... Pulseaudio, networkmanager... Those two are pieces of shit that i can immediately name that made many peoples lives worse than before. We got those rammed through our throats by companies other SUSE, but in a similar way.

So do not just bash suse for this, bash the red hatters as well, especially since they still claim that they do not care for the linux desktop.

I do hold other distros to the same standard. The only difference is that pulseaudio did not affect me (I'm on KDE and it abstracts away pulseaudio if it uses it at all). Thus, I did not have any sound issues during the whole furor over pulseaudio. The community (most of distros) adopted pulseaudio en masse even though it was immature because it allowed things down the road that no other competitors had.

Networkmanager is different. I actually *like* it. It's simple, elegant, and does what I need it to without crapping up. I also don't know of a competitor technology (snickers. Maybe you guys at Novell can start one.) with the same feature set.

[Pickle]

ask about radeon opensource drivers and you get a political discussion about what software a distro should or should not use

any mod can close this, I think it should only continue if theres something useful that can be added to the radeonhd issue I had originally.
Although Im satisfied with the results I got from the radeon driver that i can wait to evaluate the radeonhd driver later if/when a new version is released.

[barkas]

I do hold other distros to the same standard. The only difference is that pulseaudio did not affect me (I'm on KDE and it abstracts away pulseaudio if it uses it at all). Thus, I did not have any sound issues during the whole furor over pulseaudio. The community (most of distros) adopted pulseaudio en masse even though it was immature because it allowed things down the road that no other competitors had.

Networkmanager is different. I actually *like* it. It's simple, elegant, and does what I need it to without crapping up. I also don't know of a competitor technology (snickers. Maybe you guys at Novell can start one.) with the same feature set.

wicd

Networkmanager does not work for me at all.

[rjwaldren]

wicd

Networkmanager does not work for me at all.

Agreed, that's the first thing I changed on my laptop, NM was a PITA compared to wicd

[fesjo]

Right now im using radeonhd, since thats what is installed by default. 2D and composite effects have worked fine. Any apps that use opengl although lock up machine within a minute or 2. Sound will continue to play, so it seems something in the system is running. But all keyboard commands are not responsive, i.e ctrl alt del, ctrl alt F1.

It looks like the older 'radeon' driver might support my chip, so i may give that a try. Can anyone confirm?

In case you are still interested: There seemed to be a problem with 2D/3D lockup on R5XX cards with the radeonhd driver, wich was fixed in this commit: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...237cb90a3a5e38

Perhaps, you would like to give the git master a try? I'm sure, the developers would be happy, if you dropped a note on http://lists.opensuse.org/radeonhd/ if it works for you.
Here you can find how to install a recent version from git master:

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

[Panix]

Sorry to interrupt but what does it mean when the radeon OSS driver doesn't work? I have tried 3D effects in various distros including OpenSUSE 11.2. Mind you, this is with Live media but isn't that an acceptable test to predict what may happen with a disk install?

Anyway, I was hoping to learn why there are these major differences. Is there significant differences in xorg implementation or some graphics/video stack? DRI? Mesa? GL? KMS? I don't understand it but to my perception, the distros seem to have similar enough versions and packages that the differences would be subtle. But, the experiences trying the CD have been MAJOR to the extent, enabling 3D has locked up my laptop whereas other distros have been okay.

Here's a brief summary of my experiences on my Thinkpad T41 with a Mobility Radeon 9000, RV250, card:

OpenSUSE 11.2 - cannot enable XRender - receive a message that it can't be enabled and to check my configuration file; enabling OpenGL results in the screen going black and a white cursor showing - laptop is totally locked up and requires a hard restart i.e. power off/on
Mandriva 2010 - XRender can be enabled and so can OpenGL
Fedora 12 - XRender and OpenGL can be enabled - I think one of them had a bit of screen corruption when painting the screen after moving windows
Ubuntu 9.10 - cannot use an application such as Firefox after booting up; clicking 'Firefox' app and shortly thereafter, the system totally locks up. The desktop is displayed but the cursor 'wheel' freezes and so does the entire laptop - keys and mouse are unresponsive
Kubuntu 9.10 - I think XRender cannot be enabled; I forget what happens when OpenGL is tried so probably similar to Ubuntu?

[bridgman]

Unfortunately there are a lot of possible causes, and it's hard to even guess without going through the xorg log and dmesg output. That said, I believe a few people have reported problems with r2xx hardware and the radeon/drm/mesa driver stack recently, so it may be that both Ubuntu and OpenSuSE happened to pick up some code which had a problem on certain HW configs.

Put differently, the fact they both have problems could just mean the two distro releases happened to have similar schedules and therefore picked up roughly the same code.

[Panix]

Unfortunately there are a lot of possible causes, and it's hard to even guess without going through the xorg log and dmesg output. That said, I believe a few people have reported problems with r2xx hardware and the radeon/drm/mesa driver stack recently, so it may be that both Ubuntu and OpenSuSE happened to pick up some code which had a problem on certain HW configs.

Put differently, the fact they both have problems could just mean the two distro releases happened to have similar schedules and therefore picked up roughly the same code.

Oh, okay, thanks for that feedback. Certainly sounds plausible but what do I know.

Btw, I read your 'X.org sticky' and it helped to understand a bit better although I'm being generous to myself there.