After my upgrade from Mandriva 2007.1 to 2008.0 last night (using urpmi) everything is working fine, apart from one major irritation: there is a grey dialog box slap bang in the centre of my screen that says "Volume 0%" and I can't get it to close. This is the indicator dialog that would be displayed if I was using the Up/Down volume keys, and it is therefore obscuring any windows in that location.

It is almost as if there was a key stuck down, but this is not the case.

If I dual boot into my XP installation, then everything works fine, including the volume up/down key.

If I boot into Mandriva again and start a Gnome session instead of KDE, then again everything is fine, and the volume up/down key also works.

I then started KDE again and opened the kmix window. If I use my mouse to drag the kmix volume level up for the PCM audio device up (which was my master channel controlled by the volume applet), then the volume indicator in the middle of the screen also increases - but when I release the mouse, it reduces to 0% again. It is almost like it is fighting something pulling it down again.

In order to be able to hear any sound at all I have changed the kmix master channel to "3D sound", which is an unused device for me so I can successfully control my PCM audio level and therefore get sound OK.

I'm using a Dell Inspiron 9100, bog standard apart from more ram and external USB hard drive, USB DVD writer and USB mouse. I also have a Plantronics USB audio headset plugged in, which works normally.

If I can fix the underlying problem that's obviously the best way, alternatively if I can kill the program that is displaying the annoying dialog then at least I can do some work - but I can't find how to remove this.

Thanks in advance for any help or ideas.

Paul

The upgrades are still rather tricky in my experience. The failsafe approach is just to do a clean install. Maybe you could check the output of ps ax but it would probably be less trouble simply reinstalling (the affected parts of ) KDE.

Thanks for the suggestion, jay73. I'm reluctant to start from fresh, but this might be the way if I haven't sorted it by the weekend! I'm just impressed that the upgrade went as well as it did.

I have been doing some more digging, and I found this:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97803

Apparently there is a kernel module called i8k for Dell laptops which is at fault. killing process kded makes the annoying indicator go away (hooray!) but if I restart kded it comes back (boo!).
I'm assuming that kded does a whole lot more than just this function.

Here's an update:

if I kill kded, then delete the kernel module i8k with command...
rmmod i8k
...then start kded again, then all appears to be fine.

If I do lsmod then i8k is not there.
However, when I restart the system the offending module comes back :-/

So once I figure out how to permanently remove a module then I'm done.

You could try blacklisting it. I haven't had that on a Mandriva system yet so I can't be very helpful I'm afraid. You may have some luck searching /etc for a directory called modules or some such thing.

To stop the i8k module from loading on Mandriva 2008, I edited /etc/modprobe.preload as root and commented out the 'i8k' line using a '#'. Now I am cured of the volume indicator problem, and as far as I can tell, I don't seem to have lost any functionality by not using i8k. Happy now :-)

Mandriva 2008 seems nicer in many subtle ways and has been stable for me so far.

Thanks,
Paul