I'll have to be real confident in someone before screwing with the kernel,especially since this issue seems to span several years and distros.

Right now VLC is working good,and I got rid of all other players anyway.The system runs good other wise,just that empty driver manager bugs the hell out of me and like I said,A guy at Mint forums posted about that 4 days ago and no one will respond,which seems to be par for the course over there,and this should be a simple deal.

Anyway,I'm starting to think linux just don't want to play nice with these GM965/945 chips.I would think bugs would worked out by now if possible. Well,thanks again Ztcoracat off to bed again.

I agree with you about the kernel.

I found this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2236950

Looks like it's a BUG:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=756337

If I can find out why the Driver MGR is blank and how to fix it you'll be the first to know.-

Ok, MST246:

Sorry to be the barrier of bad news but I read through the dmesg log twice and it's very clear to me what is going on.
That driver/module (i915) that is servicing your GPU has a bug. Here's the confirmation on that-
The other 2 red flags in the log are a crash dump report to analyze GPU hangs and a message about what a developer can do with it.
I'm not a developer and can not fix this for you.

-::- Your best bet is to try other distributions on your pc.-::-
-::-<OR> replace the graphics card which would require you to dissemble it or take it to a pc repair shop-::-

I've taken a few laptops apart and re-essembled them and you have to be 'very meticulous' about what you do and pay close attention to the details.

Give Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core, Lubuntu and maybe Vector Linux which is a lightweight distro with XFCE and it's fast.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=damnsmall
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=tinycore
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=Lubuntu
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=vector

+1

I cannot stress this enough! A while back, I had to replace the video cable (that goes from the screen to the motherboard) on my laptop and, unfortunately, I damaged one of the parts (the bezel or plastic piece that goes around the screen) because I didn't pay close enough attention to one of the diagrams in the online manual. Fortunately, some super glue bonded the part back together.

Regards...

Glad to hear the super glue worked-

There are three must have's when working with a pc.
-a pair of tweesers (non-magnetic)
-a magnifying glass
-a pair of anti static gloves for building
<OR> stand on a bare floor w/o carpet in bare feet.

I've recently wondered if it was possible (of course desoldering/solder chip can be done) if replacing the GM965 with something else would even work on my laptap.I would not think it just a simple matter of solder out/solder in and away we go.I'm pretty sure gateway would not tell me.

Not sure about trying another dist,Mint runs very fast and smooth except for the one hiccup.Otherwise it's handled everything I've thrown at it.

Wondering if the 64 bit version would make a difference? Probably not,and not sure I want to reinstall now because it is running good and VLC is the only video player I use and it's working good.

Still,I'm curious about the chip replacement theory.Wonder where I could find out for sure.

I doubt Gateway would give you any info. on that.

I've never done any kind of soldering but I would imagine if your not careful you can render your mobo inoperative.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+To+...onnections/750
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsa-PlUGza8
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/...therboard.html

Another option would be to replace the mobo. That's provided that there isn't something proprietary (like an extra piece of plastic or metal arm connected to the case)that would prevent you from putting any other board in it's place. (manufacturers are notorious for this) HP did it in the 90's with desktop pc's.

BTW, it's not good to breath in the fumes and hot dross of a soldering gun.
You will need to purchase a vacuum machine that does that for you.

Breathing in lead can't be a good thing. Lead has nasty effects on the brain.

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-m...-the-PCB-board
http://electronics.stackexchange.com...mes-bad-for-me

Lead has nasty effects on the whole body,I'm experienced at that kind work.

Just had a strange problem coming back from win 7 partition.When mint loaded, The following error popped up:

"failed to start the x server (your graphical interface) would you like to view the x server output to diag the problem."

I said yes but there was nothing there.It took me to login thru the terminal and from there I had to run:

sudo dpkg reconfigure xserver-xorg

and it said not installed.

So I had to run

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg (something like that)

then ran
startx

all seems good,but what the hell.

-:-Me too, 16 years of Dentistry-:-

I guess I lied about being all good,I now have no audio it's using something called dummy output and i don't see an option to change it

More than just no audio I just ran this:

glxinfo | grep render
libGL error: failed to open drm device: Permission denied
libGL error: failed to load driver: i965
direct rendering: Yes
GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.4, 128 bits)
GL_MESA_ycbcr_texture, GL_NV_blend_square, GL_NV_conditional_render,

Problem Type: BUG:-

https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+bug/1302270
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=857662


Even if you had the best debugging tool that's for Linux only a Developer would know how to use it.
I'm sure that we have members here that are good with debugging but that's not my area of expertise.

Sorry you have a Bug. If I knew how; I would teach you how to fix it.

I figured out,I think,why my boot scrwed up on me last night.Don't know why,as I had rebooted several times after doing something I should not have.Still extremely noobish to linux but,I know better.

When looking for answers to my driver questions,I found this

https://01.org/linuxgraphics/forum/g...l-ubuntu-14.04

The 4th post down describes a way to make the Intel driver installer work for Linux Mint 17.2 by running the following:

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-lts-utopic xserver-xorg-lts-utopic libgl1-mesa-glx-lts-utopic libegl1-mesa-drivers-lts-utopic

So,I did.After about 3 minutes of processes running thru the terminal,including uninstalling VLC (easy enough to get back) for some stupid reason,it was time to run the Intel graphics installer but,it said unsupported dist.I stopped there and went no further into the matter as I was running good.

What I found out after my boot problem was that running that code changed my damn Kernel from 3.16.0-38 to 3.16.0-50

I managed to get all working good again.

Hi...

Please watch the language, if you would.

So everything is working as it should, even the original issue has been corrected? Are you continuing to use the new kernel? If so, what does "dmesg" report now?

Regards...

Hi ardvark71

The original issue is still there (media players crashing upon opening)but as long as the player has the option to output in x11,then I'm good to go.

Games would be a problem but,can't do them on this box anyway.I liked to run skyrim in wine just to load my xbox 360 version to tweak some things.I'll just have to boot Win 7 to do it,oh well.

I don't know if this is an actual bug or Linux will just never be able to work the way it should with my Intel GM965 chip.Not sure what to do with this thread.Can't really mark it as being solved,as that would just mislead people who searched this issue.