[gentoo-user] Fed up with Xorg + hal mess

Alex Schuster · External Since: Dec 18, 2006 Posts: 47

I wrote:

> At the moment I am away for two days from my machine, and so I am doing
> the BIG update now. xorg-server is upgraded to 1.6.3.901-r2, I followed
> the upgrade guide and also did the libxcb stuff. I removed then kdeprefix
> use flag, unmerged all of kde-4.2, updated world, depcleaned. Now emerge
> @kde-4.3 is running.
> And then... we will see. Come on, Gentoo, surprise me, and give me a
> running KDE 4.3 desktop with X and OpenGL and mouse and keyboard. That
> would be great.

And what I got may possibly be all of that, but I cannot see it, as the
display is just blank. I can switch back to a text console, so the keyboard
is working. And I see no apparent error messages in the X log file. I
attached another monitor, it is also blank. I hear it clicking as it does
when it switches the resolution. And its information display shows the
correct resolution. Happens with fglrx, radeonhd, radeon, vesa.

In case an anyone likes to have a look, here are Xorg log and xorg.conf. I'm
not really sure what to do now. Downgrading would be messy and will not work
for long, I really would like to solve this problem now.

http://wonkology.org/~wonko/tmp/Xorg.log.fglrx-2.6.28_tuxonice-r3
http://wonkology.org/~wonko/tmp/xorg.conf.fglrx

Thanks,
Wonko

walt · External Since: Dec 20, 2006 Posts: 27

On 10/11/2009 02:30 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> I wrote:
>
>> At the moment I am away for two days from my machine, and so I am doing
>> the BIG update now. xorg-server is upgraded to 1.6.3.901-r2, I followed
>> the upgrade guide and also did the libxcb stuff. I removed then kdeprefix
>> use flag, unmerged all of kde-4.2, updated world, depcleaned. Now emerge
>> @kde-4.3 is running.
>> And then... we will see. Come on, Gentoo, surprise me, and give me a
>> running KDE 4.3 desktop with X and OpenGL and mouse and keyboard. That
>> would be great.
>
> And what I got may possibly be all of that, but I cannot see it, as the
> display is just blank...

What I do when faced with an X problem is to type "X" at a console prompt
and see if the bare X server starts up normally, i.e. with the black-and-
white background pattern and the x-cursor. That at least will separate
the kde bugs from the xorg bugs.

I use startx, so doing this trick is easy for me. If you use a display
manager like xdm,kdm, etc then you'll need to disable that temporarily
so you can boot to a console prompt.

BTW, did you generate a new xorg.conf after the upgrade?

Alex Schuster · External Since: Dec 18, 2006 Posts: 47

walt writes:

> On 10/11/2009 02:30 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> > I wrote:

> >> And then... we will see. Come on, Gentoo, surprise me, and give me a
> >> running KDE 4.3 desktop with X and OpenGL and mouse and keyboard. That
> >> would be great.
> >
> > And what I got may possibly be all of that, but I cannot see it, as the
> > display is just blank...
>
> What I do when faced with an X problem is to type "X" at a console prompt
> and see if the bare X server starts up normally, i.e. with the black-and-
> white background pattern and the x-cursor. That at least will separate
> the kde bugs from the xorg bugs.

Yeah, that's what I did.

> I use startx, so doing this trick is easy for me. If you use a display
> manager like xdm,kdm, etc then you'll need to disable that temporarily
> so you can boot to a console prompt.

I am also not using KDM the moment, because after my last attempt with ati-
drivers, KDE4 did not start from KDM. Using startkde worked fine, though.
Although I think that even with the display manager running, X -- :1 should
just start a second server.

I am not sure how the KDE upgrade went, all I can say yet is that using
kontact on that machine right now via vnc works.

> BTW, did you generate a new xorg.conf after the upgrade?

Not really. There's not too much stuff customized there, so I just kept it,
replacing only the Driver entry with radeonhd, vesa and such. I used to
create fresh configs with X -configure, but this stopped working long ago, X
always crashes when I do this:

(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Mon Oct 12 11:58:17 2009
List of video drivers:
radeonhd
radeon
ati
fglrx
fbdev
vesa
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:17:0)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:0)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:1)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:2)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:19:0)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:19:1)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:19:2)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:0)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:1)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:2)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:3)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:4)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:5)
found
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@1:5:1)
found

Backtrace:
0: X(xorg_backtrace+0x37) [0x8136a67]
1: X(xf86CallDriverProbe+0xe8) [0x80ada48]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11. Server aborting

I also tried without an xorg.conf, but then X does not start. Turns out I
had fbdev in my VIDEO_CARDS a while ago, and did not depclean, so xf86-
video-fbdev was still installed. Removing it, X starts, but of course I also
get the blank screen, and no apparent errors.
http://wonkology.org/~wonko/tmp/Xorg.log.2.6.28-tuxonice-r3

Okay, what next. This is driving me nuts, I never got great performance from
my Radeon HD 3200, but at least I always got a display finally, not a blank
screen. And I always had some X errors I could investigate in order to solve
the problem, but now I do not really know what to do. File a bug? Plug in a
PCI card and see what happens then? Try a third monitor?

Wonko

Alex Schuster · External Since: Dec 18, 2006 Posts: 47

I wrote:

> walt writes:

> > What I do when faced with an X problem is to type "X" at a console
> > prompt and see if the bare X server starts up normally, i.e. with the
> > black-and- white background pattern and the x-cursor. That at least
> > will separate the kde bugs from the xorg bugs.
>
> Yeah, that's what I did.

And that was the problem. I am pretty sure this just CANNOT be, but X runs
fine if I start it via startx or KDM. I think even if the checkerboard X
background I am used is no longer there, I should at least have seen the
mouse, but, whatever.
Oh, when I start X with fglrx in xorg.conf then, I get a blank screen again,
but the keyboard hangs, I have to to the Alt-SysRq-R trick to go back to a
text console. But that is also blank, the 'textmode' does not help, and I
have to reboot. But vesa or radeonhd seem to work, at least.

> I am not sure how the KDE upgrade went, all I can say yet is that using
> kontact on that machine right now via vnc works.

It did not work well. I cannot start any WM with KDM, after half a second
KDM just restarts. I had this before already, but I thought it was related
to the new ati drivers which I do not use now. XSESSION=kde-4.3 startx works
though.

But my desktop/session is a mess. Windows have no title bar or border, the
panel is cleared off most things, and such. I renamed ~/.kde4.2 to ~/.kde4
before that. But then I cannot start kmail, because it wants to write into
~/.kde4.2/share/appes/kmail/.

Should I start from scratch? Probably yes. I guess this problem comes from
switching from +kreprefix to -kdeprefix.

Wonko