My unhappy adventures with Linux installation


Seems like Handbrake works in a different way than on Windows o_O but I like it !!

On Windows it was updating the queue to disk only when the program was closed, so, after a crash or a power failure I had to manually remove from the previous queue all the things already done...

Instead on Linux it is constantly updating it, and after a damn power failure Handbrake loaded the queue with just the things still to do !! :) cool

A bad things is that i'm not able to run Tales of Maj'Eyal :( the precompiled doesn't work, and the source need some still unreleased precise version of libraries to be compiled...

...and it is not even in the repo :(

also I'm still fighting with that damn Bluetooth kernel panic... :(

EDIT: oh, and the monitor energy save turns on when using SMplayer2 even if I set in the options to disable the screensaver while playing o_O
 
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The last one may be systemd usurping power management functionality while conveniently ignoring the established configuration methods of the desktop environment. At least it does for power/suspend button events. Not sure about this case.
 
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Quite possibly, although not from the description it's DPMS turning the monitor to standby or off, not the screensaver displaying. That could still well be systemd (although I forget if what I did to enable monitor blanking on my arch box involved systemd or something older - the arch wiki suggests you use setterm in my case). If it is systemd playing, it just sounds like systemd's not been integrated into Powergod's linux installation well yet, although at the same time it's fair to say integrating it wouldn't be so hard if systemd didn't have its fingers in every inode.
 
I'll have to investigate about those daemons... I just used the "Screensaver" GUI utility in LXDE (xscreensaver)...

In the advanced tab it contains settings for monitor standby and shutdown, but them never worked until I set the screensaver to "Blank screen only"
 
Ah LXDE on Debian. How up-to-date is that? I remember trying LXDE on Fedora only a couple of years back, and it was stupidly out of date even then and wouldn't save my mouse settings over a reboot, and Debian doesn't particular strive to be up-to-date. Worth checking what version you've got, versus what you can get directly from http://www.lxde.org/download

Out of interest, whoever posted it a few pages back, how do you tell LXDE not to update windows while dragging? That's the only thing that put me off using it on my old P3 server, since it seemed not to cope well with the redraw of a simple window taking more than a frame, and every time I moved a window it created a backlog of draw events. I couldn't see an easy way to turn instant redraw off, so I switched to Enlightenment, but appears to either be a bit obscure in places, or my install is subtly broken, I can't tell.
 
I found it is not so simple to find the LXDE version... I had to look at every component version...

mostly them are all from 2011, but as far I see on sourceforge, the only updates from 2011 were made late this year, so that should be the reason why them are still not in the repo.

About moving windows without refreshing I found an option in the Openbox configuration, but seems not working.

EDIT: oh, it's working, but only on resizing

EDIT: systemd is not running
 
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Ah, sorry. Assumed it would be there, because systemd is default on debian testing.
 
Yeah, in debiana, systemd is only coming in Jessie. If you're still on Wheezy, that's a whole world of pain (the fun sort, obviously) to come.

I'd still be very interested to find out if it's possible to configure LXDE to provide a bounding box type thing while dragging, and only rendering the final window when you release the button. Having it do something like that when resizing is useful, but I first noticed the problem when dragging windows about, as it always took at least two attempts since you couldn't tell on the first drag exactly where you were moving it to unless you held the button down still long enough to let it catch up.

Edit: Stable is whezzy, not sid. Sid is always the unstable pre-testing branch, while Jessie will become stable, and a new toy story character will need to be found to name the new branch.
 
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I don't have the problem you describe when moving a window, I can see clearly where I'm putting it, there's just a little tail that disappear in less than a second even while moving (Sometimes I've seen worse on Windows XP).
 
Yeah, I'm only doing it as an experiment, given it's an old Pentium 3 with the intel graphics of the day. I mostly use it over ssh, so I don't need an X server running locally and use tmux if I want any windows or fluff like that ;) But I thought it might be nice to see what DEs work on an old system like that.
 
Found out the solution for the LXDE stand-by during SMplayer/SMplayer2 sessions:

just added in ~/.mplayer/config and in ~/.mplayer2/config this line:

heartbeat-cmd="xscreensaver-command -deactivate"This will disable the screensaver while SMplayer is open. (Not just while playing something.)
Maybe it is not still the "perfect" solution, but it's the best I found so far.

Anyway seems that SMplayer/2 are the only one with this problem, the other players like Caffeine or VLC are able to disable the screensaver by themselves.
 
I'm still playing with the system to try solving the Bluetooth kernel panic, and I found out what the "backports" repository is for.

That repository contains updated drivers that can be used on older kernels, and I have seen that there are even Bluetooth related drivers.

So, now I want to try this road, but first I want to search more info about possible issues that I may have after the upgrade... if you know something about this, please tell :)
 
Yesterday I happily started the upgrade to Jessie, read a lot of possible issues, but I found nothing that could have harmed my system...

anyway to prevent possible problems I started with an upgrade (instead of a dist-upgrade)

All seemed fine... so after everything was finished I rebooted...

hd1 out of disk (or something similar)

Grub rescue>_

...and now I'm lost... WTF means "out of disk" ? All my HDs have at least 4 Gb free

luckily I still have around my USB Puppy and my Floppy Bootloader...  this evening I will have to read/search a lot... :(
 
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It doesn't mean you don't have any diskspace left, grub2 doesn't find any bootable harddisk, so probably during update something with grub went wrong.


Best way would be to reboot into a liveCD and reinstall and reconfigure grub. Maybe Debian has a rescue system setup on the boot CD? Or just chroot and reinstall.


BTW: This webserver is also aready running on Jessie :)
 
Damn, my booting Floppy is becoming full of CRC errors... after some trials I luckily was able to start Puppy... Now I just don't have to turn off my PC until I succefully downloaded and burned everything I should need :D

I had many problems with Debian CDs when I tried to install it on this machine, that's why I had to put them on USB, to modify their boot grub menu...

After reading around the internet I will try first that super-easy "Super Grub Disk" everyone is speaking about, before doing something else
 
PowerGod said:
WTF means "out of disk" ?
Click to expand...
As Rincewind would put it:  In Discworld, being out of disk, is something very very bad...

From: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/

Contrary to our wishes, there may be some problems that exist in the release, even though it is declared stable. We've made a list of the major known problems, and you can always report other issues to us.
Click to expand...
I still run: Debian GNU/Linux 7.8 (wheezy) ... and looking at your problems, I will still be running it for at least half a year...
 
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I had read the list before the upgrade, but except for some version incompatibilities with programs that I don't use I did not see anything else...

I just tried a floppy with "Super Grub Disk", and it's indeed SUPER !! :D

It found both Windows and Linux, and I was able to start Debian from its menu...

There's only a limit, it's just a standalone bootloader, it has nothing to repair the installed one...

Anyway, with it now I can at least start all my OSes, and I have seen the first start of Debian after the update... there were A LOT of checks of the disk... but seems like I have no boot.log to read better what happened...

For now I'll just try this

sudo update-grub
sudo grub-install /dev/sdaEDIT: ...AAAAAND IT WORKED !!! :D The boot menu is there again in all it's glory :D
Now seems the time to run dist-upgrade and see what happens... -_-
 
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