nightmare installation and other problems

anti-destin · 2009-11-02 06:33:57

i'm having some severe issues with my new install. i've reinstalled arch maybe 5-6 times today, but i keep running into problems.

installation: the first time i tried to install arch today, i chose 'network' for the source. everything was fine until i updated to the latest kernel. when i restarted, my laptop froze at the udev step: waiting for udev uevents to be processed. i couldn't get past that point.

so, i tried to install from the cd, and that worked fine. i was also able to update everything except the kernel and get to the login. this suggests that the kernel is the problem. am i doing something wrong here?

now, i put kdemod onto the system. everything seemed fine at first, so i decided to try compositing. that worked for a bit, but then i got some serious artifacts and general lag. i tried rebooting, but now i can't do anything. opening anything immediately causes the system to freeze. i can't even get to the system settings to turn off compositing.

this is all very unusual since about a month ago, i was able to install arch perfectly fine and even turn on compositing without any issues. not sure what's wrong now.

is there anything i should check? i'm currently running xp off of my external hard drive because my arch installation isn't working properly.

thanks.

grey · 2009-11-02 10:29:03

Did you actually try to upgrade the kernel of the CD install? If things go horribly wrong you can always boot the fallback kernel and then downgrade.

Mr.Elendig · 2009-11-02 11:03:20

You can turn off the compositing from the cli. Just boot to runlevel 1/3 (depending on how you start X) and disable it.

anti-destin · 2009-11-02 15:03:19

grey wrote:

Did you actually try to upgrade the kernel of the CD install? If things go horribly wrong you can always boot the fallback kernel and then downgrade.

i did try to do that. i installed arch with the kernel on the cd, and then i tried to upgrade everything. but then when i reboot, the system freezes at the 'waiting for udev uevents to be processed' stage. i can't even login. fallback leads to the same point.

here's what happens. i boot up, it says 'loading udev uevent' or something to that effect, and freezes when 'waiting for udev uevents to be processed' says '[busy]'. then the system is unusable.

there's definitely something wrong with the kernel on my system. now, if i want to upgrade to the latest one, what should i do? it will definitely cause the same problem, if my testing indicates anything.

Mr.Elendig wrote:

You can turn off the compositing from the cli. Just boot to runlevel 1/3 (depending on how you start X) and disable it.

thanks for the tip. i booted, logged in, and before running 'startx', i edited the kwinrc file. now i'm able to boot into kde (running it right now).

however, i have a couple of questions.

1. why can't i use compositing? i know it's not my system, since i was able to use it perfectly a month ago.
2. could these compositing issues be related to the fact that i'm not using the latest kernel?

Mr.Elendig · 2009-11-02 15:25:35

What card and driver?

anti-destin · 2009-11-02 15:41:35

laptop is an lg e300, ati radeon xpress 1250 (onboard graphics).

i installed the open source driving by typing: pacman -S xf86-video-ati

grey · 2009-11-02 17:09:27

KMS. Again. We finally get a xorg-server release that doesn't break intel, and it's crashing nvidia and ati.

I've seen this behavior trying to boot larch on my laptop, which has ATI graphics. Black screen at the udev stage. What fixed it was to add "nomodeset" to the kernel line in grub/menu.lst.
That was before the update to xorg-server 1.7.1, so now things may be different. And maybe it's not related to KMS. But I'd give it a try and disable it (it is enabled by default for ATI iirc).

Last edited by grey (2009-11-02 17:10:22)

Mr.Elendig · 2009-11-02 18:13:09

http://www.archlinux.org/news/468/

kjon · 2009-11-02 18:21:54

about your freezing udev, try adding hpet=off to your menu.lst

Arch Linux

#1 2009-11-02 06:33:57

nightmare installation and other problems

#2 2009-11-02 10:29:03

Re: nightmare installation and other problems

#3 2009-11-02 11:03:20

Re: nightmare installation and other problems

#4 2009-11-02 15:03:19

Re: nightmare installation and other problems

#5 2009-11-02 15:25:35

Re: nightmare installation and other problems

#6 2009-11-02 15:41:35

Re: nightmare installation and other problems

#7 2009-11-02 17:09:27

Re: nightmare installation and other problems

#8 2009-11-02 18:13:09

Re: nightmare installation and other problems

#9 2009-11-02 18:21:54

Re: nightmare installation and other problems

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