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#1 2009-07-16 14:30:02

SardarNL
Member
Registered: 2008-11-22
Posts: 10

Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

Greetings to all. This post is just yelling about instability of Arch. However if you can give me some tips, I will greatly appreciate it.

Why Arch is so ******* unstable?

I like the idea of minimum system and configuring everything by myself. And I did it half year ago, everything was perfectly configured:
  - Automounting with HAL (including hiding windows rescue partition).
  - suspend/hibernate (pm-utils on uwsusp, great thing)
  - sound, wireless, video, ssh
  - lots of other things

I had some (unpleasant) experience with Arch before, so I knew -- never upgrade unless you need it. However I do upgrade once in 2 months, just to limit the pain of "reconfiguring everything at once". Before upgrading I do always consult archlinux.org for news/tips and I always follow all instructions when package is updated. And I'm ******* tired of the fact -- each update degrades functionality and breaks my system. Sometimes there is no solution how to fix new pack of bugs, so the only solution is to downgrade. And downgrading means recompiling the desired package manually (there is no downgrade in pacman).

The last upgrade was one week ago. Since then:
  - inability of HAL to automount disks  (after last update, no HAL things where in update list).
  - still can suspend/hibernate, but can't get LID closed, AC off and other events, so I have to suspend/hibernate manually from menu/console (1 update before, I guess after devicekit-power appeared in update list).
  - if I unplug AC power state doesn't change, when plugging it in again the gnome applet says "Discharging..." and then switches back to AC (few upgrades before). However now if I unplug AC then my laptop goes into suspend state directly (after last upgrade).
  - firefox is constantly consuming 1 core 100% on tiny little Flash banner (dual core laptop) (happens with firefox 3.5, after last upgrade)
  - beep'ing again on backspace in empty text field, very annoying. PC speaker modules are blacklisted, they do not appear in lsmod (and I guess they are removed or compiled with the kernel since I can't find them). xset b off solves the problem for 1 hour, then it resets by it self. Fixed by cronjob that runs hourly with xset b off (after the last upgrade).
  - after suspend/hibernate my sound and wireless are dead, so I have to reboot. Un-and-Reloading all modules fix the thing, but especially for sound there are too much of them to be better solution than reboot (appeared after last upgrade).
  - lots of other small bugs, but I can live with them

And this all is happening when I am busy with the last things for my university, so I don't have the time to fix everything.
I don't use [testing] repository.

So the question is: am I so unlucky or stupid?  Yes, upgrading when you don't have the time to fix things is stupid, i know... :-\
How often do you upgrade and how often do you suggest me to upgrade?
What is happening in there, why all those regressions? I don't see any new features (maybe they do exists, but probably I don't use them), only regressions :-\

Thanks for advice.
And sorry for my bad English.

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#2 2009-07-16 16:17:12

arkham
Member
From: Stockholm
Registered: 2008-10-26
Posts: 516
Website

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

SardarNL wrote:

Greetings to all. This post is just yelling about instability of Arch. However if you can give me some tips, I will greatly appreciate it.

Why Arch is so ******* unstable?

Don't like, GTFO. No one is forcing you to stay.
Been updating almost every week for a year and a half and not a major problem.

SardarNL wrote:

So the question is: am I so unlucky or stupid?  Yes, upgrading when you don't have the time to fix things is stupid, i know... :-\
How often do you upgrade and how often do you suggest me to upgrade?
What is happening in there, why all those regressions? I don't see any new features (maybe they do exists, but probably I don't use them), only regressions :-\

When you're happy with your system and you don't have the time/expertise needed to keep up with the updates, don't update.

SardarNL wrote:

Thanks for advice.
And sorry for my bad English.

And probably you might want to try ubuntu.


"I'm Winston Wolfe. I solve problems."

~ Need moar games? [arch-games] ~ [aurcheck] AUR haz updates? ~

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#3 2009-07-16 16:22:53

wonder
Developer
From: Bucharest, Romania
Registered: 2006-07-05
Posts: 5,941
Website

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

your are not unlucky. half of your problems are becase of gnome-power-manager 2.26 which is broken upstream. the others are can't say more becase maybe is a problem related to your  hardware and kernel2.6.30.


Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.

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#4 2009-07-16 17:43:36

koch
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2008-01-26
Posts: 369

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

i run a "pacman -Syu" almost every day on two machines here and have almost no problems.
try it once a week and most troubles should be easier to handle because there is less to care/read about.

Last edited by koch (2009-07-16 17:44:15)

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#5 2009-07-16 19:43:05

reed9
Member
Registered: 2008-06-12
Posts: 77

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

I suppose unlucky.  I upgrade every couple of days and haven't had any breakage since...I don't remember.  It was something with the gnome panel crashing, but I don't use GNOME anymore since Openbox won me over.

In fact, I put arch on an old laptop that I just use as an mpd server, after having frequent kernel panics and other weirdness with Debian stable.  Since I put Arch on it, not a single problem.

Arch runs smoother for me than any other distro I've tried.

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#6 2009-07-16 19:53:08

loafer
Member
From: the pub
Registered: 2009-04-14
Posts: 1,772

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

I pacman -Syu whenever updates are available, that way there normally aren't too many in one go.  If I find a problem I downgrade using pacman and wait for the next version of the offending package(s). 

This is fairly rare and when I have done so it's often been due to a minor annoyance rather than a serious breakage.


All men have stood for freedom...
For freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down.
Gerrard Winstanley.

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#7 2009-07-16 21:46:21

SardarNL
Member
Registered: 2008-11-22
Posts: 10

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

Don't like, GTFO.

I wasn't insulting you.

And probably you might want to try ubuntu.

I've tried it for several months. I've experienced some problems:
  - about 10% of the times it won't boot, just hangs with no apparent reason. but it boots 100% successfully from hibernate, so it wasn't a real problem
  - some time ago there were major problems with the Intel wireless driver shipped with the kernel. Randomly between 1-3 hours of work it hangs the system. Fixed by switching to proprietary ipw3945 driver, spent some time to get it working. After few days Ubuntu suggested updating, accepted without checking (my fault), the driver was replaced again by iwl one.
  - hibernate and NetworkManager worked really bad, couldn't fix hibernate (replaced NetworkManager by wicd, solves the second problem)

So it was unstable with installing lots of unneeded software and without flexibility of easy configuration like Gentoo or Arch. The major problem was again - updating - but this time it was suggested by OS instead of initiating it by me.

Next OS was Gentoo, which is really good with possibility to install any version of any program (downgrading, feature I miss in Arch). Used it for 1 year, then switched to Arch after I was tired of compiling large packages + some minor problems.

half of your problems are becase of gnome-power-manager 2.26 which is broken upstream.

OK... (rhetorical question) why it is in upstream...?  :-\
I will switch from Gnome soon then. (I'm using Gnome since installing Arch because KDE4 was very unstable back then and KDE3 has some minor problems)


2 All, sorry for this flame-generating topic. I had just the "enough!" feeling when HAL wasn't able to mount my disk after suspend and the sound was dead again. Most problems are power/device related and I've heard HAL is being replaced by DeviceKit. I was thinking maybe we are in the middle of some major change in the system and the new features are just being tested... maybe someone can suggest how not to participate in this.

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#8 2009-07-18 11:00:22

EasyTarget
Member
From: Amsterdam
Registered: 2009-02-16
Posts: 17
Website

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

"Been updating almost every week for a year and a half and not a major problem."
- I simply do not believe you. Either your setup is farcically minimalistic , or you'think' you are updating but are not, or you are lying.


My anger management class pissed me off. - anon

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#9 2009-07-18 11:22:23

schuay
Package Maintainer (PM)
From: Austria
Registered: 2008-08-19
Posts: 564

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

EasyTarget wrote:

"Been updating almost every week for a year and a half and not a major problem."
- I simply do not believe you. Either your setup is farcically minimalistic , or you'think' you are updating but are not, or you are lying.

Why not? I have Arch on quite a few PCs, 3 of them are updated daily. No major problems that a quick forum search or a bit of tinkering couldn't solve. Testing repo is enabled btw.

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#10 2009-07-18 11:37:26

EasyTarget
Member
From: Amsterdam
Registered: 2009-02-16
Posts: 17
Website

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

"No major problems that a quick forum search or a bit of tinkering couldn't solve."
This kinda proves my point: Arch is unstable, as demonstrated by the fact you had to go searching and tinkering to workaround get it working when it breaks.
Which is why I consider Arch a nice toy, but it will never run any server or desktop of mine.


My anger management class pissed me off. - anon

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#11 2009-07-18 12:34:29

kgas
Member
From: Qatar
Registered: 2008-11-08
Posts: 718

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

In 4 laptops at home, I do daily -Syu and no major issues as on date and a gnome fan. gnome power manger works just fine in all the machines.
one hp dv5 laptop  with ATi card gives trouble sometimes at the boot time and required two or three hard reset.

For hal the issues may be related to policy. For most of the issues you mentioned had been discussed in the forum.Eg. Battery status in gnome.

Please keep in mind that Arch is a rolling release and you are getting all the software up to date (new software--> old bugs fixed/new functionality + some other bugs).

Arch developers are doing good work. I appreciate their effort to make this great distro thriving.

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#12 2009-07-18 12:46:40

Dinth
Member
From: London
Registered: 2009-03-02
Posts: 238

Re: Unstable HAL, gnome, devicekit-power etc

Im big fan of updates and even unstable software versions. I do pacman -Suy and yaourt --aur --devel -Suy (i have many -svn packages) many times a day, and dont have major problems wth stability after any upgrade.

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