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Well, hello everyone.
I installed Arch linux on my computer three days ago now. I'm a "veteran" (note the quotes) user of Debian GNU/Linux (I used Debian for about 5 years or so I believe), but lately I've been frustrated at the speed that new versions of packages were released into the unstable repositories. Over the years, I'd seen many Debianites switch to using Arch linux, and someone I know recently re-reccommended it to me, so I thought I'd give it a try.
First off: my computer. My computer is an Acer Aspire something laptop. It has an Intel T5450 dual-core, 1.67GHz processor, 2.5GB of RAM, an Intel X3100 graphics card, which uses the 965GM chip, 320GB HD. Fairly low-end, but it does get the job done for me.
I made a full backup of Debian's /home partition, then repartitioned my HD. It now has something like the following (for the space allocated to Arch, anyhow):
/dev/sda5: 256MB, mounted at /boot
/dev/sda6: 50GB, mounted at /
/dev/sda7: 50GB, mounted at /home
/dev/sda8: 4GB, used as swapspaceWith that done (I used a GParted LiveCD for the partitioning), I put the x86_64 image onto a 512MB pen drive, and installed Arch, fairly successfully.
To be honest, I am impressed at the speed Arch installed and recognized everything. With Debian it was always a struggle to get my wireless network card working (I installed Debian five separate times onto this laptop), but Arch recognized it out-of-the-box once I selected the firmware from the pacman list during the install.
I connected to a wireless network, installed X and KDE (took me a while to figure out that I had to install xf86-video-intel, Debian has a metapackage that automatically installs all the video drivers. Inefficient on bandwitdth and space, but convient.). I also installed the development tools that I thought I'd need (gcc, g++, gdb, cmake, etc.) I am now fairly fluent in how pacman works, though I don't think I can name every single argument yet.
I puttered around in KDE 4 (Debian only recently got KDE4 into unstable, less than a month ago now), until I noticed something . . . odd. The screen all but froze. CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE did nothing, CTRL-ALT-F1 did nothing. CTRL-ALT-DEL did nothing. But I could still move the mouse. The keyboard was completely gone, input from the keyboard did nothing. KDE (X, basically) froze. I ssh'd into my computer from another machine. When I attempted to kill X, it didn't respond to a SIGTERM. When I used a SIGKILL, though, it did exit. I could restart X from the ssh session, but the display itself refused to cooperate. When I rebooted, everything worked perfectly -- until it froze again.
Being familliar with weird Linux issues by now, I googled the problem. The only thing I came up with was someone whose computer froze due to syslogd being overloaded with messages (from firewall debugging output, all the DROP messages). I checked my syslog. That wasn't the problem. I googled again. I came up with nothing.
I installed awesome (the window manager), to see if it was a KDE problem. Five hours later, X was still going strong. (Note that I did not use any KDE applications during that time). So, thinking it was a compositing error, I disabled all desktop compositing. It still crashed. I gave up on that, and I'm currently using awesome for now.
This is my first problem: Why does KDE (and through it, X) crash, about once an hour?
Onto my second problem, then . . .
I use dialup at home (you know, the internet connection method that goes over phone lines?), so I downloaded and installed PPP. Once I configured it, though, and attempted to connect to the internet, things went wrong.
I literally copied my configuration from Debian, made a few tweaks to it, then told it to go connect itself. chat does it's work correctly, it recieves a nice CONNECT. However, once chat is finished, it is supposed to hand the game over to pppd, which will establish the serial connection and grab an IP address. The problem is: it doesn't. It simply sits there until the connection times out. (I have a timeout in my chat script).
So, my second problem is: Why does PPP not do its job correctly? Why does it hang until the link times out?
Bear with me. I'm a newbie to Arch, but I'm fairly competent with Linux overall. I'd post the PPP configuration files, but I'm afraid I don't have a pen drive with me at the moment, and I'm (of course) not using Arch to write this.
In any case, if there is anything you can help me with on these two major problems, I'd be grateful.
Thanks.
EDIT: Note that I searched both the forums and the wiki on both of these problems. Forgot to mention that, sorry. Also note that I need a dialup link, so no "just get broadband" messages, please.
Last edited by Lagaro (2009-05-27 19:17:17)
-- Lagaro
There is no darkness in Eternity/
Only light too dim for us to see.
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A quick update: I've re-installed Debian onto the same system, so that Arch and Debian exist side-by-side. The same freezing issue crops up on Debian and KDE4.
So, I suppose, this isn't an Arch-related issue. Now, I suppose I should change that question to A. should I file a bug report, and if so, B. where should I file the bug report, since this is an X issue that appears to be triggered by KDE.
If someone can even point me in the correct quadrant, that would be appreciated.
Thanks again.
-- Lagaro
There is no darkness in Eternity/
Only light too dim for us to see.
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For yet more information (I'm sorry, I should have gathered all of this *before* I posted, originally), this is not a very easy bug to track down.
I've searched through the logs (nothing), I've rmmod'd all my modules except for the ones required to run X (no difference), I've run with and without desktop compositing (fluke it may be, but it seems to last longer with compositing on. Probably just random chance, though). I've done the same thing on a different distro (Debian), to the exact same results. Zero. Nada. Nothing. According to the system, it's chugging along just fine. ssh sessions are still active, so I can shut down the computer using those. I've updated to the latest X server (1.6.1.901-1), latest everything in the standard, non-testing, Arch repos.
If anyone can offer a hint, or say that I'm not alone because they are running into this exact same problem, please, respond.
Thank you.
-- Lagaro
There is no darkness in Eternity/
Only light too dim for us to see.
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Yet another update: after playing around with ppp's configuration, I discovered that I didn't have noauth in my provider file. ppp is now working correctly (I'm posting this via my PPP link).
But now hibernation isn't working correctly. It writes the memory to the swap file just fine, but upon resuming, it completely ignores the swap file and continues to a normal boot. I've set resume=/dev/sda8 on the kernel init line in grub, but to no avail. I'll keep playing around, but hibernation isn't completely required.
I've submitted a bug regarding the KDE freezes to bugs.kde.org. The freezing now occurs more like once every three hours.
Thanks yet again.
-- Lagaro
There is no darkness in Eternity/
Only light too dim for us to see.
Offline