Adventures in Karmic
I rebooted my laptop today, to effect the latest updates to Karmic. Well, actually, that was a side effect. I had to reboot because my Intel i965 hung (again). I’ve written a watchdog script which detects this condition and attempts to gather debug information, but it hung trying to read some files in /proc/dri.
After the reboot, new problems so far include:
- My keymap is set to USA at the gdm greeter (rather than USA/dvorak as was correctly done before): bug 401047 (hey, we’ve passed bug 400000 recently)
- I found myself unable to launch any X applications from a terminal, because I was unconditionally setting the XAUTHORITY environment variable in my ~/.zshenv, and apparently gdm is now putting it in /var/run/gdm (this one was my fault)
- I’ve ended up with two volume control applets with different behavior. One is gnome-volume-control-applet, and the other seems like it might be built into gnome-panel
- indicator-applet crashed: bug 401051
- Reporting the above bugs required several attempts, because Firefox 3.5 crashed intermittently trying to open a new tab:
Gdk-ERROR **: The program 'firefox-3.5' received an X Window System error: bug 401055
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)'.
Things which have improved:
- My monitor’s graphics modes are now detected correctly
- 2.6.31 seems to be stable for me now
Problems which are still present:
- I get a dialog box upon logging into GNOME which informs me that the GDM greeter won’t save its position: bug 395324
- My console keymap is not set to dvorak, though it’s still configured that way in /etc/default/console-setup and running setupcon fixes it (and changes the font): bug 392218
We'll see | Matt Zimmerman 
The new GDM is a mess it doesnt even have kde as a session on the list even though its installed.
shanefagan
July 18, 2009 at 14:26
The two volume controls are, respectively, the good old GNOME mixer (although with the slider horizontal rather than vertical) and some new WIP code that would transform everything into a PulseAudio stream waiting to be redirected in a way that is similar to the applet that comes with PA. Too many volume controls, operating in a way that’s extremely inconsistent, if anyone asks me.
Martin-Éric
July 18, 2009 at 20:20
Again a specific things because of PA… I hate PA since this thing appeared in the distrib I felt like coming back 10 years ago when the sound was a big mess between OSS and alsa.
albert
July 19, 2009 at 08:17