Misc problems with Slackware 13.1
 

I am currently experiencing major problems with a system that should be "stable" as it is supposed to be...

I am using slack 13.1 (stable) and have the following problems:

1. Kontact is no longer usable.. Slowly it went from totally functional to complete garbage. First I lost Akonadi but kmail was still working, then I lost kmail completely. It simply hang/freeze whenever I press send to send a new email... According to my "googling", it would be caused by akonadi. My "googling" also showed that some people simply uninstall akonadi, but the problem is that if I do this, kontact simply wont start... Currently, akonadi simplified self test report says:

What frustrate me is that I did not touch or modify ANYTHING since I installed slack a few months ago, and it was working back then...Also I filed a bug report in KDE-Bugs and never got any replies.

2. I am also experiencing a VERY strange video problem. Please see thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...isplay-830040/

To make a long story short, I recently got both laptop GeForce 8700M GT cards replaced as well as my LCD replaced and I have color problems/cannot activate SLI. Again, the color problems appeared a few weeks ago, and the SLI used to work with Slack 12.2. I never tried with 13.1 before but obviously it doesnt work. Again, using STABLE drivers as well as Slack 13.1 STABLE... Lots of details on my video issues with the link above. Gotta mention this works flawlessly in windows XP/vista/7

3. General Slack 13 sluggishness. Slack 12.2 used to be lightning fast, very responsive and extremely stable. Since I migrated to slack 13 I never felt the same thing... CLicking on buttons I can fell a delay, scrolling windows is sluggish, moving windows as well, the system uses 650MB of ram IDLE.. I think nvidia might be responsible for part of this..

Because every computer is different, and every slack installs are different, it would be nearly impossible to troubleshoot 100% accurately my problem, so I am only seeking guidance and opinion on this 3rd issue.

4. Somebody know how to have the stupid notification popup to automatically close so I dont need to click the X every time a message appears? I am talking about the KDE notification popup in the task bar.

Globally I moved from Slack 12.2 to 13 because some of my appz required KDE4... and then from 13 to 13.1 because I had problems with 13 stability. I think KDE is also a major problem with slackware... I believe the back end (core) of the system is still good, but the icing on the cake is way too fat... At the end of the day I use this machine for every day activities such as banking, finance tracking, home work, misc admin work and light entertainment (music youtube, vidz, etc) and need a machine that works... thats why I moved from windows to slack at first a few years ago. Now I kinda question the move..

Well, since you are having X problems, I'm not surprised that your X display is slow.

I'm running Slackware64 13.1 right now with SLI enabled. I don't run KDE unless I log in as root, which I do very rarely.

You might want to check ~/.xsession-errors to see if anything is being written into there.

Richard, first of all thanks for the reply, as you can imagine I will be monitoring this thread as much as possible from my blackberry.

The xsession-errors file is 5 light-years long.... its over 1600 lines long and keep growing... What should I copy on this thread to be useful? There is errors about akonadi (of COURSE!!), Kwin, Knotify are pretty much the most "popular" processes in there, and there is roughly 1300 lines from kbuildsycoca4, but I dont see much about the X server or nvidia related...

except that:

Should I have so much stuff in there!?!?!?!?

Look at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...isplay-830040/

Look at the syslog messages.. apparently, the messages:
would mean insufficient or mis-allocated memory between the GPU's and the main RAM.. I got that from Google... That would be why my SLI is not working... Kernel problems??

Well, your lspci output in the other thread was very weird:

So I wonder if there is some type of goofy BIOS setting that is making your two identical cards report differently?

My SLI enabled cards report themselves to be the same (they are the exact same model, so they should):

Was this an upgrade from 12.x or a fresh install? You may want to drop out of X, rename your ~/.kde directory to something else, and restart KDE. If that clears up some of your issues, then it might be incompatible KDE configuration from the previous releases.

Richard,

yes you might be right, lspci SHOULD show 2 identical descriptions such as "VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G84 [GeForce 8700M GT] (rev a1)" and not a "3D controller..."

I remember it used to show that in Slack 12.2... also I am not the only one in this situation: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/arch.../t-127679.html

In the BIOS there is nothing to fool around with the video cards.. I have NO on-boards... its a laptop (Dell XPSM1730)

No it was not an upgrade from anything... Fresh install from Slack 13.1 ISO DVD... Stock KDE as well (KDE4.4.3) from 13.1

Isn't all that strange? The guy who posted at the link above also has a XPS laptop like mine... could it be some firmware crap from Dell??

EDIT: this one also has a XPS M1730 and it seems that his 2nd GPU is also recognixed as 3D controller... http://centos.org/modules/newbb/view...27163&forum=40

I just logged in using KDE a couple of times.

Wow.

The version in 13.1 vomits a ton of crap into ~/.xsession-errors, so I guess that amount of crap in your ~/.xsession-errors is expected behavior.

I never really cared for KDE before that test; I really don't care for it now.

At any rate, I can't really help with the Dell stuff. Sorry.

yeah kde 4 is pretty crappy... not far from windowz... imagine if its puking all that crap in the error log whats going on in the background.... sounds like Im not the only one that does not like kde4.

WHat are you using? Gnome? something else?

For the Dell stuff, I will try on the nvidia forums and see what I can get there... I will have this thread here and a thread over there maybe somebody got it figured out..

you most likely have errors in your install media
I had a bunch of problems with a fresh install it turned out to be a bad CD
down load the slackware ISOs and check the md5 sums
then recheck the sums of the media after you burn it

Hey rob! your suggestion was smart, but I checked the md5 has for all the install file (I did not use a DVD iso but I mirrored the slack tree to my server) and all files passed the md5 checksum with success... so I believe my install repository is clean.

Maybe there was something configured differently for nvidia in xorg.conf in 12.2. Just a thought.

I had problems with sending mail when i messed with akonadi, trying to get rid of akonadi error message that popped up when starting kmail. Maybe removing akonadi directories could help.

Make sure there're no data you want to keep in these directories, maybe couple of them are not even necessary to remove, i blindly removed everything related to akonadi/nepomuk/kontact:

As for kde notifications i installed 'colibri' notifications from kde-apps.org, they look fine and are completely passive, great for amarok for example. I also disabled notifications for file transfers, this reverts kde4 to displaing kde3 style popup windows for downloads.

veeall
thanks for the input! there is definitely something wrong with nvidia and/or x... actually, everything is getting just slower and slower, even scrolling a page in firefox is choppy and closing a simple konqueror window is delayed...

for akonadi, well its simply a mess... i'll try what you suggest.
thanks!

lpallard,

KDE 4 is pretty good and Slackware 13.1 is pretty responsive, provided that you have set your hardware and BIOS right and have fiddled a bit configuring KDE.

To be more detailed, make sure to use the proprietary nvidia driver for your video card. You can download and install the nvidia-kernel and nvidia-driver packages from slackbuilds.org. If you have 2 video cards, make sure that you use the driver for the enabled card.
To make KDE4 more responsive, I strongly recommend you to disable Aconadi in the system settings.


Have fun

Martin

Martin,

right now I am using KDE4.4.3, would you think the new 4.5 would help? Im also using Kontact & Kmail... if I delete/nuke/destroy akonadi, I lose Kontact all together...

also my main concern is the nvidia stuff.... again right now I just installed slack, and then installed the driver from Nvidia (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.53.run)

I never heard about the nvidia kernel and nvidia module from slackbuild.. whats the difference? I tough the nvidia driver was installing its own module....

Can you clarify?
Thanks!

Well, it's probably easiest to just read this and that.

I have windows 7 that ran as good as windows gets along with Slackware 12.2 on this machine a Dell gx280 with never a problem. I installed Slackware 13.1 and that is where my problems started a lot of them the same as above. Someone on this forum suggested that it might be a hardware problem.
(1) I did a memory test everything turned out ok.
(2) next I did a smartctl long test, it found an unused "before with 12.2"section of my /home had some bad blocks that was being used with 13.1. I blocked those bad blocks and everything was ok for a while then it started all over again as it turned out the hdd was crashing. I would suggest that you might look at hardware just to be sure. There is Slackware 13.1 on 2 machines here now and they are working fine.

smartctl -t long /dev/hda
smartctl -H /dev/sda to look at results of long test

Im on my way to fix the video problems..... as for the hardware checkup, I did a full memtest on the RAM, no errors... I will try the HDD checkup as well and post the results back.

lpallard,

do not uninstall anything from your Slackware installation. Just disable file indexing in the KDE system settings. It is the file indexing that takes a lot of system resources. To see which process eats your system, use "top".

With the Slackbuilds of the proprietary nvidia driver you actually install the same driver. It is just more convenient to install/uninstall/upgrade the driver using the slackbuilds.

Martin

I would agree with this on most things, but not the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The installer does a very nice job of uninstalling the old driver and reinstalling the new driver when it's time to upgrade, and uninstalling is just as easy. Also the installer now detects if you are running the nouveau driver and will even blacklist it for you. :)

I'm on my way to fix (hopefully) my video problems, and then I'll attack the slackware/KDE slowness problems...

I just tried to install 185.18.36 and of course i am having new problems... now this thing says that:

Error: unable to determine the version of the kernel sources located in /lib/modules/2.6.33.4-smp/sources. Please make sure you have installed the kernel sources files.........

What do I need to do? I use the stock 2.6.33.4-smp kernel from Slackware 13.1

256.53 can build and install without problems...

As far as I know: /lib/modules/2.6.33.4-smp/sources is a simlink to /usr/src/2.6.33.4/ (or something like that) and that seems to be the normal non-smp kernel sources, so I understand why the nvidia script complains about the sources not matching the running kernel. How can I get the sources of this kernel??

Make sure you have the package kernel-source-2.6.33.4_smp-noarch-1.tgz installed. To see what packages you have installed on your system, issue:

There were changes in the kernel several months ago. Some of the headers were relocated and this was common in -current at the time. A newer driver or symlinks for the relocated kernel headers were the answer. The newer driver is probably the better option.

Re KDE4 slowness - I'm using slackware 13.1 on an intel atom powered eee pc and driving an external 19" monitor too and KDE4 is just fine. So, I'd certainly think it's possible for you to get reasonable performance on your hardware.

One thing that gobbled memory, cpu cycles and HD space/bandwidth was nepomuk/strigi - once I turned that off my experience was much smoother.

I just uninstalled strigi and basically cooked KDE.... nothing works now... How can you guys remove akonadi and strigi & nepomuk and get everything else still running fine????? Its not the first time that I try that and last time I ended up reinstalling slack alltogether

damgar, I cant use a newer driver as apparently (from my post on nvnews.net) the version 185.XX is the LAST driver that worked on the XPSM1730 under linux... Thats why I am "trying" to install the 185.36 right now and it does not work.

I did install ( and already had) the kernel-source-2.6.33.4_smp-noarch-1.tgz package from the slack dvd and problem persist. Right now I have:

/lib/modules/2.6.33.4-smp/sources that is a symlink to /usr/src/linux-2.6.33.4/ so NO smp in there... are the sources for -smp exactly the same as the normal kernel??? If not, then there is a glitch in the packages hence why it does not work.

Could nvidia related problems be due to nouveau driver, maybe X is using that by default? Nouveau should be blacklisted for nvidia drivers to install properly. In current, maybe in 13.1 too, there's a 'xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist' package that handles this.

As far as i know akonadi/nepomuk/strigi is required for kde4, for example kontact or kmail won't run with akonadi uninstalled. Still, strigi and nepomuk can be switched off from kde systemsettings.

Edit: Oh, i didn't notice that. Must be something else then.

I added nouveau to modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.

I also tried something based on my research over this community and the Nvidia forums... its to patch an older driver... some threads on nvnews.net pointed out that since 185.XX series, the SLI has not been working properly on the Dell XPS M1730 with more recent drivers (190.XX to 260.XX)... SO I downloaded driver 190.53 and patched it successfully then installed it.

Some of my comments:

-Better overall performance (window dragging, moving, scrolling, pictures, etc)
-Seems to have improved responsiveness
-Still no SLI!! I suppose I am using 190.53 and thats > 185.XX so as I explained before, it wouldnt work... anybody know where I could get the patch for 185.18.36? As far as I remember, in slack 12.2 this was the driver that worked for SLI... that kinda fits what I read on nvnews.net...

Hopefully with 185.XX the SLI will work...

Ooops - I did say turn turn it off! There's an option to do so under system settings (advanced tab I think). Akonadi doesn't have an off switch afaik and uninstalling it can cause issues, but it isn't anywhere near the resource hoggery of strigi/nepomuk so I just leave it be.

Yes thats correct, I reinstalled strigi and everything is back to normal... I disabled them (nepomuk & strigi) and I am back to before.. I am working hard to get the older driver 185.XX from nvidia running on my machine. All that is getting really confusing for me... since I moved to linux on a permanent basis, these days have been the most challenging so far! So many issues interrelated and no simple solutions!

I guess thats how we learn!

I guess I am thinking about bad hard drives as well... I just lost myu server's HDD and that triggered the idea that some bad sectors in my laptop's HDD's could be the root cause of my problems. I will perform some kind of complete backup and then I will do a surface check to see if there is any physical damage...

I will post back.

Just to close this thread, I reinstalled slackware 64 13.1 on this laptop and this fixed most of my problems. Probably corrupted install media or anything like that. RAM was tested and was OK, HDD #1 (I have 2 HDD"s in this laptop) is slowly dying (some bad sectors)...

I will close the thread since so far I assume the problems to be solved by a reinstall and finding the hardware problems.

Thanks to all for the previous help!