Mandriva Linux 2007 Errata Mandriva Linux 2007 Errata page List of errata related to Mandriva Linux 2007 Introduction This page contains the Errata for Mandriva Linux 2007. This means it contains information on known problems with Mandriva Linux 2007 and, where available, how to fix, avoid or work around them. You should also see MandrivaLinux2007ReleaseNotes , which contains more general information on the Mandriva Linux 2007 release. Errata for earlier Mandriva Linux releases Other errata pages are also available for older versions: * MandrivaLinux2006Errata * MandrivaLinux2005Errata Installation General instructions: installation problems often require the use of kernel parameters. To specify kernel parameters during installation, simply boot the installer as usual. On the very first interactive screen, where you are presented with the options "Boot from Hard Disk", "Installation" and so on, highlight "Installation" and then just type the kernel parameter required. You will see it being added to the "Boot Options" text box near the bottom of the screen. When you have typed the required kernel parameters, simply hit Enter. * Boot problems may be related to bad MSI interrupts: to de-activate MSI interrupts boot with the pci=nomsi kernel parameter. * PNP (Plug 'n' Play) may trigger bad interactions: in this case, boot with the pnpacpi=off pnpbios=off kernel parameters. This is known to be a problem with the Dell Optiplex sx280. See bug_small.png Bug #23279. Kernel General instructions: kernel problems often require the use of kernel parameters. To set up kernel parameters to be used at every boot, run Mandriva Control Center and go to the Boot tab. Click on "Set up how the system boots". Click on "next". Choose the menu entry you usually use to boot the system (normally just 'linux', the default choice) and click 'Modify'. Then type the required kernel parameters into the 'Append' box, click 'OK', and then click 'Finish'. * The PAE memory addressing mode used in kernel-enterprise to support more than 4GB of physical memory is currently incompatible with ACPI suspend/restore; a future update of the Intel AGP driver should resolve this issue. * XFS stability issues: XFS is currently not a recommended filesystem with kernel-2.6.17; updates should be available shortly after release to improve support for this filesystem. For now, we recommend you do not use it. * JFS issues during install: the mkjfs program may abort during install when used in the presence of a reiserfs partition. Slow internet response (particularly web browsing): IPv6 There is a known problem with all Linux distributions that enable IPv6 networking (the new standard for network addresses which uses a longer, hexadecimal address format to provide a much larger number of possible addresses. The old standard is IPv4, which gives the four-groups-of-three-digits decimal address format most people are familiar with, e.g. 216.105.167.65). Some systems and networks do not cope well if your system has IPv6 networking enabled. If you experience sluggish response on the Internet - especially when browsing web sites - and cannot find the cause, you should try disabling IPv6. To do this, edit the file /etc/sysconfig/network, add the following line, and reboot: NETWORKING_IPV6=no Issue with networking/firewire on Zepto/Compal models including Znote 6515WD Using these laptops you will get "Disabling IRQ# 11" (or similar) resulting in broken networking. After installation this can be fixed by making a few changes to the /etc/modprobe.conf file: blacklist ohci1394 blacklist ieee1394 Sound always plays through speakers on Zepto / Compal Znote 6515WD On this laptop model, sound always plays through the internal speakers even if you plug a pair of headphones or speakers into the headphone / speaker output jack. If you want to be able to toggle between using the internal speakers and the headphone / speaker output jack, there is a script that can help you. To use it, first download the script, filename 'speaker'. Open a console and navigate to the directory where you saved the script. Now run this command, to make it executable: chmod ugo+x speaker Next, run the command su and enter your root password to gain root privileges. Then run this command, to make root the owner of the script: chown root.root speaker Finally, run this command to move the file to the /usr/bin directory, so you can run it from anywhere: mv speaker /usr/bin You can now switch between the internal speakers and the headphone jack with these two commands: speaker on speaker off Please note that this script will not work for all laptops that display the same symptom (sound always playing through internal speakers). For many models, you can toggle between the internal speakers and the headphone / speaker jack by toggling one of the switches in the KDE or GNOME volume control applets. ipw2200: Firmware error detected. Restarting. To fix this add the following to the /etc/modprobe.conf file: options ipw2200 hwcrypto=0 PC Card devices not found See also bug_small.png Bug #26112. Users of some (particularly new) laptop models may find that the system does not seem to recognise PC Card devices at all. If you are having trouble with PC Card devices, check whether they show up in the output of the command lspci run as root. If not, you may be suffering from this problem. To fix it, you can try rebooting after adding the following kernel parameter (for instructions on using kernel parameters, see the start of this section): pci=assign-busses This is known to be a problem on the following systems: Acer Travelmate 2410 series (2413). Hardware support Incorrect display resolution on machines with Intel graphics chipsets: XFdrake cannot install 915resolution package Certain laptops with Intel display adapters have a problem where the BIOS does not correctly report the available graphical resolutions to the operating system, making it impossible to configure the correct display resolution for the laptop's flat panel (flat panel displays have a single native resolution which should always be used: displaying at any other resolution results in a considerable drop in display quality). On Linux, the 915resolution program exists to resolve this problem: it corrects the list of available resolutions provided by the BIOS, enabling the system to use the correct resolution. Unfortunately, this package was inadvertently left out of the Powerpack and Discovery editions of Mandriva Linux 2007. If you cannot configure the correct resolution for your laptop, and XFdrake (the graphics configuration tool) complains of being unable to install the 915resolution package, please use the software media manager application to set up your system to download and install packages from our public package mirrors in addition to your installation disc(s). To do this, run the Software Media Manager: open the Mandriva Control Center, and go to the Software Management tab. Click the link titled 'Select from where software packages are downloaded when updating the system'. Click 'yes' when asked if it is OK to continue. Now click the 'Add...' button on the right hand side of the new screen. When asked whether to add 'Official updates' or 'Distribution sources', click 'Distribution sources'. Click 'Yes' in reply to the question about the mirror list. When the mirror list appears, choose a mirror close to your geographical location. Wait for the process to complete. If it completes successfully, you're done. If it does not, choose another mirror and try again (since the 2007 release is very new, the mirrors will be very busy and some may not be properly set up for 2007 yet). Once this process is complete, XFdrake should be able to download and install the 915resolution package, and enable the correct display resolution. Issues with Bluetooth support See also bug_small.png Bug #24359. Mandriva Linux 2007 includes the latest version (3.2) of bluez, the Linux Bluetooth support layer. Unfortunately, this version made several changes that the KDE and GNOME Bluetooth desktop support applications have not yet entirely caught up with. To use Bluetooth with Mandriva Linux 2007, you will have to run some commands manually. First of all, at each boot, you should run the command: passkey-agent --default /bin/bluepin Alternatively, you can install the keychain package, which will register the passkey agent at every boot. It also acts as an agent for ssh and GPG keys. Secondly, if you wish to pair with your computer from another Bluetooth device, your computer's Bluetooth adapter must be in discoverable mode. Unfortunately, with the new bluez it is currently not possible to set the computer to be permanently discoverable or to make it discoverable from the KDE or GNOME Bluetooth support applications. You must do it with the following console command: hciconfig hci0 piscan This will make your computer discoverable for a few minutes. You must run this command each time you wish to make the computer discoverable. System startup Potential issues with the parallel initialization system Mandriva Linux 2007 introduces a new parallel initialization system. For more information on this, see the Release Notes. There are some potential problems with this system in certain cases. Many previously hidden race conditions (a problem where, depending on the speed of your hardware and other possible factors, processes or commands may be run at the wrong time or in the wrong order) appear. In particular, some buggy network drivers are only usable a few seconds after their initialization, but incorrectly inform the system that they are usable immediately. This can cause services that depend on the network being available to start too early. Such services include autofs and ntp. There are various possible solutions: * disable ifplugd. ifplugd is the daemon used to detect when the network link is available. To disable it, you need to know the name(s) of your network interface(s). You can find this information from the output of the command ifconfig, run as root at a console. For instance, wired ethernet interfaces are usually named ethX, where X is a number - the first such interface is eth0, the second is eth1, and so forth. Wireless interfaces can have various names depending on the driver used, including but not limited to athX and wlanX. Use ifconfig to find the names of all affected network interfaces. To disable ifplugd, you must edit their configuration files. The configuration files can be found in the directory /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ with names in this format: ifcfg-(interface name). For instance, the configuration file for the eth0 interface is /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 . For each affected interface, edit the appropriate configuration file and add this line: MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=yes In the case that there is already a line reading: MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=no simply change the 'no' to 'yes'. * set a timeout for the affected interfaces. The network initialization system can be configured to wait for a short time after the network driver claims it is available before actually starting any network-dependent systems. To do this, identify the affected interfaces and edit their configuration file(s) (see the instructions in the previous bullet point) and add a line like this: LINK_DETECTION_DELAY=5 This would set a timeout of 5 seconds. For a longer or shorter timeout, change the 5. The network configuration tool sets a timeout automatically for some drivers which are known to have this problem. * disable the parallel initialization system. To do this, use nopinit as a kernel parameter. For instructions on using kernel parameters, see the Kernel section above. For more information on this issue, see bug_small.png Bug #18986. Software issues Alacarte does not work See also bug_small.png Bug #25389. Alacarte, the GNOME menu editor, contains a bug which causes it not to work correctly in Mandriva. The program will run and seem to function correctly, but adding new menu entries and modifying / deleting existing ones will not work. Our GNOME maintainer has submitted a patch for alacarte to GNOME's bug tracking system: GNOME bug 355830. Once this patch is integrated by the GNOME developers, the updated version of Alacarte will be provided as an official update for Mandriva Linux 2007, which will resolve this problem. In the mean time, we recommend using another XDG-compliant menu editor, such as the KDE-native menu editor kmenuedit. GNOME Power Manager no longer working after resume See also bug_small.png Bug #23603. After a hibernate/resume cycle, GNOME Power Manager will display incorrect information and will no longer react to power events, such as pressing the power button or plugging in and unplugging the power cord. This is because suspend-scripts restarts the haldeamon service upon resume to ensure it catches hardware that got plugged in or removed while the machine was suspended. GNOME Power Manager does not reconnect correctly to HAL and no longer sees any events reported by it. Until an update is provided, a workaround is to edit the /etc/sysconfig/suspend file and remove haldaemon from the RESTART_SERVICES list. Please note that by doing this you may have problems if you plug in or remove hardware while the machine is suspended. Banshee may not start on some systems On some 32-bit systems with the SSE2 feature and for users of either KDE systems or users who do not use Gnome applications, Banshee may fail to start. The workaround is to start 'gst-inspect-0.10' in a terminal. This will create the ~/.gstreamer-0.10 settings directory required by Banshee. Refer to bug #26183 for details. GDB Developers may experience restrictions when trying to replace an executable after a gdb session. If a executable has been accessed through gdb, a 'cp' operation will fail with an 'insufficient access' error. The workaround is to remove the faulty executable, then copy or move the new version to its previous place. 3D-accelerated desktop (AIGLX, Xgl) 3D-accelerated desktop non-functional with Mandriva Club edition for Standard members Mandriva Club members at the 'Standard' level are entitled to download a special edition of each Mandriva Linux distribution which consists of the first four CDs of the Powerpack edition. Unfortunately, an oversight in the process of building the 2007 release meant that the task-3ddesktop package, which is needed by drak3d (the tool that allows you to enable and disable the 3D-accelerated desktop feature) was placed on the fifth CD of the Powerpack edition. This means that with the four CD edition, you cannot enable the 3D-accelerated desktop feature. To remedy this problem, please use the software media manager application to set up your system to download and install packages from our public package mirrors in addition to your installation CDs. To do this, run the Software Media Manager: open the Mandriva Control Center, and go to the Software Management tab. Click the link titled 'Select from where software packages are downloaded when updating the system'. Click 'yes' when asked if it is OK to continue. Now click the 'Add...' button on the right hand side of the new screen. When asked whether to add 'Official updates' or 'Distribution sources', click 'Distribution sources'. Click 'Yes' in reply to the question about the mirror list. When the mirror list appears, choose a mirror close to your geographical location. Wait for the process to complete. If it completes successfully, you're done. If it does not, choose another mirror and try again (since the 2007 release is very new, the mirrors will be very busy and some may not be properly set up for 2007 yet). Once this process is complete, you should be able to use drak3d to enable the 3D-accelerated desktop feature. 3D-accelerated desktop not starting under GNOME Some users, especially those upgrading or preserving /home directories from previous versions of Mandriva, may find themselves unable to enable the 3D-accelerated desktop under GNOME. Even after running drak3d and selecting one of the 3D-accelerated desktop options, on login to GNOME the native window manager (metacity) will start up and no 3D desktop effects will be observed. This problem can usually be rectified by removing the file ~/.gnome2/session . We recommend you simply move this file somewhere else (for example, your home directory), rather than deleting it, so it can be restored if problems arise as a result of its removal. Once you have removed the file, log out of GNOME and log back in, and you should observe that compiz is started instead of metacity, and the 3D desktop effects appear. 3D-accelerated desktop and video playback If you use the 3D accelerated desktop technologies included in Mandriva Linux 2007 (AIGLX or Xgl), you may notice that video playback does not work very well - moving, resizing, maximising the video window will cause problems, or you may see strange artifacts in or through the video. You may also notice that, if you use the 'cube' feature of compiz, the video does not play while you rotate the cube. To avoid these problems, you should set your video player to use an output driver which does not use video overlay. The way to do this is different for different video players. * For players that use gstreamer (for e.g. totem-gstreamer), run gstreamer-properties, go to the "Video" tab, and set the video output to "X Window System (No Xv)". * For mplayer, add this line to ~/.mplayer/config (and also to ~/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf if you use the mplayerplugin browser plugin): vo=x11 * For xine, go to the settings menu, set your configuration experience level to "Advanced", then go to the video tab and change "video driver to use" to "xshm". * For Kaffeine, go to the settings menu, select "Xine backend configuration" and in the video tab change the driver to "xshm". * For KMplayer, go to Settings -> Configure KMplayer. Then in the "General Options" section go to the Output tab. In this section change Video Driver to "X11Shm". Note that for all applications you may have success using the OpenGL video output driver, depending on your hardware and whether you use Xgl or AIGLX, but some combinations will still have problems with the OpenGL output driver: X11 is the only choice that will always be safe. 3D-accelerated desktop and some Java/Swing applications See also bug_small.png Bug #25900. Some Java applications using Swing may not display correctly under Xgl/AIGLX with compiz - the usual symptom is that text is not displayed. A possible solution is to run the following command at a console before launching your java application: export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit If this works, you may want to add these two lines to the file ~/.bash_profile (that is, the file .bash_profile in your home directory): AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit export AWT_TOOLKIT Some people have also reported that this issue is fixed in compiz-quinnstorm, an alternative version of the compiz compositing manager that is used to implement 3D accelerated desktop effects. These packages are available in the contrib media. To test them, you will need to remove the compiz package and install the following packages from contrib: compiz-quinnstorm compiz-manager compiz-quinnstorm-plugins cgwd cgwd-themes csm. Please note that compiz-quinnstorm will not recognise configuration changes made by gset-compiz, the compiz configuration tool launched by drak3d. You must use the new csm configuration tool instead. 3D-accelerated desktop and multiple logins See also bug_small.png Bug #24863. There is an issue with AIGLX which may prevent users from logging out and in again multiple times when using the KDM or GDM display managers (by default, KDM is used). One way to work around this issue is to force your display manager to restart X on logout. For KDM you should edit the file /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc and check you have in the [X-:*-Core] section the following line: TerminateServer=true For GDM you should edit the file /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf or /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf and check you have in the [daemon] section the following line: AlwaysRestartServer=true Another option is to use this script to log out. Save the following text as a file, for example, logout.sh: #!/bin/bash rm -f /tmp/.X93-lock rm -f /tmp/.X11-unix/X93 dcop kdesktop default logout Make the file executable, either with the chmod +u logout.sh command or by using the graphical File Properties dialog. Running this script will log the current user out and remove the lockfiles that prevent another user from logging in, which should allow you to login again with no problems. You can create a desktop launcher that runs the script, for ease of use. Please note that this script will only work in KDE. 3D-accelerated desktop and KDE shortcuts See also bug_small.png Bug #25394. When you use the 3D accelerated desktop feature you may find some commonly-used KDE keyboard shortcuts no longer work correctly. This is because the compiz compositing manager used to provide 3D desktop effects does not know how to pass these shortcuts on to KDE correctly. The most commonly experienced problem is that alt-F2 no longer brings up the 'run program' dialog box. To fix this problem, run this command: gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/run_command0_k ey 'F2' --set /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/command0 'dcop kdesk top KDesktopIface popupExecuteCommand' --set /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/op tions/run_key 'Disabled' If you wish to reverse this change, run these two commands: gconftool-2 --unset /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/run_command0_key -- unset /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/command0 gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/run_key ' F2'