Your Linux Self-Help Desk. A selection of mostly Linux related tutorials, howtos, fixes, news and more.
Okay, I've got a dirty hack for now to work around the flicker problem in Kubuntu 8.10. You can edit /usr/bin/startkde and comment out the line starting ksmserver (kwrapper4 ksmserver).
Then instead write
kwrapper4 krunner &
kwrapper4 plasma &
kwrapper4 kwin
There will be no session management, but also not flickering. I'll let you know when I find a better fix.
Update: Eventually I did find a much better fix. But it doesn't work for KDE 4.2 (yet).
TuxArena put up a nice summary of some useful apt-get commands.
I have to correct them in one point: For dpkg -L to work, the package needs to be installed already.
I also have a few extra ones:
Don't upgrade your Ubuntu to 8.10 if you want to use a dual head setup. There second screen will reguarly turn off for a second while there is an edid ddc scan shown in the Xorg.log. (The bug is not really fixed or fix not in main repository yet. Or I've found a different one. -> It's still not working!)
And the whole system will stutter during that time. That makes video playback very annoyingly slow and usage an external monitor impossible. I'll let you know when I find a fix.
After upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 (release candidate), I've recently noticed stuttering in video playback. That might very well also be related to my using the intel 2.5.0 xorg driver. But Phoronix now made a correct examination and found out Ubuntu is getting slower and slower since 7.04.
Complexity or just bad programming? Is it related to the kernels gettings worse and if so, is that related to the Ubuntu patches or the vanilla kernel? I'm curious for hopefully following explanations.
Let me begin by stating that the intelfb driver is very old already. And there are issues. Mode setting with "non-CRT" devices usually fails:
intelfb: Non-CRT device is enabled ( LVDS port ). Disabling mode switching.
intelfb: Video mode must be programmed at boot time.
So you need to set the mode very counter-intuitively via the vga kernel commandline. To do that, you need to know the mode. Especially on 64-bit systems the only way to find it out is sudo hwinfo --vbe.
Now you can use a kernel command line like video=intelfb:mode=1280x800 vga=0x0362 and the system should boot with the chosen resolution. Even if you're using a laptop like I am.
This will not work with a kernel earlier than 2.6.28-rc1 from my experience, but maybe you're lucky. If nothing happens, try the newest kernel. And of course feel free to comment in any case. And I think this works only if the intelfb module is compiled-in, not if it's compiled as a module, as it usually is in distribution kernels.
I just had the error message
"pstocanonij write error,32."
when trying to print something with the Original Canon Printer Driver and my MP610. It turned out I needed to cancel the job. I printed a test page and then I printed the same thing again and it worked just fine. Sometimes it hangs up and I have to turn if off and on again.
But I still have no idea why he's cleaning his inks several times a day currently...
Update:
The error comes up more and more often now and I haven't found a real fix yet. It might be related to certain settings. The printer prints one page and then stops printing.
FIX:
You can either use a different driver (e.g. the gutenprint one), or it may be an incorrect page border setting. In my experience, changing the page border settings back to their original settings (31,75mm) fixed the problems. You may have to reboot your computer and turn the printer off and on again for it to work again.
If you want to link some libraries statically and other dynamically you can use these switches:
-Wl,-Bstatic -lsomelibstatically -Wl,-Bdynamic -lotherlibshared
If you just want to compile it all statically, use LDFLAGS="-static".
I've compiled Dillo 2.0 for Ubuntu amd64 (or "intel64") and packed with upx. It should work with other amd64 distributions as well. It does not need fltk 2.0, it's statically linked. Ssl support is missing. It didn't find my ssl library. The required libraries are:
linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fffde5fe000)
libjpeg.so.62 => /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 (0x0000003e44800000)
libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 (0x0000003e40c00000)
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x0000003e3dc00000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x0000003e3f800000)
libXi.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXi.so.6 (0x0000003e41c00000)
libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0x0000003e44000000)
libXft.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXft.so.2 (0x0000003e46400000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x0000003e3d800000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x0000003e3fc00000)
libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007f6dd6242000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x0000003e3d400000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f6dd6033000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x0000003e3cc00000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000003e3ba00000)
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x0000003e41000000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x0000003e41400000)
libxcb-xlib.so.0 => /usr/lib/libxcb-xlib.so.0 (0x0000003e3ec00000)
libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0x0000003e3f000000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x0000003e3d000000)
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x0000003e40400000)
libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0x0000003e3f400000)
libexpat.so.1 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1 (0x0000003e40000000)
libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x0000003e3e800000)
Enjoy! ;-)
Well, if browsers were only about pure speed and size, I guess dillo would always win. It's probably the most minimalist browser for X. And it's blazingly fast. It Opens extremely fast, it loads webpages in amazing speed. And now version 2.0 is out. Unfortunately there are no amd64 packages available, so I had to go and do it myself again. I will put them in a seperate post.
Until now it seemed Opera was the most innovative Browser out there: Tabs, Browser Sync, "Magic" Input bar, ... Opera had it first, or did it better.
Now Firefox came with their JIT Javascript engine and Chrome added a multi-threaded approach to that and I ask myself: How will Opera react?
In my experience Opera has been pretty good with most webpages and was faster, especially with many web pages at the same time. But it does get laggy then. And especially (Google's) web applications such as Gmail and Google Reader respond pretty slowly in Opera.
I've set up the email account, because I was bothered how long things took in Gmail. And using Firefox was not better, using both is really annoying.
I wish Opera was available with Chrome's innovative new features... Hopefully they're already working on it. And Opera Browser for the Web 2.0.
I've compared the performance of both drivers with a simple iperf test over a few meters:
Broadcom Proprietary Driver:
TCP
------------------------------------------------------------
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 46362
[ 4] 0.0-10.2 sec 24.6 MBytes 20.2 Mbits/sec
[ 5] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 46363
[ 5] 0.0-10.2 sec 24.6 MBytes 20.2 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 46365
[ 4] 0.0-10.2 sec 24.0 MBytes 19.8 Mbits/secUDP
------------------------------------------------------------
Receiving 1470 byte datagrams
UDP buffer size: 375 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 35141[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 24.2 MBytes 20.2 Mbits/sec 1.364 ms 0/17239 (0%)[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1 datagrams received out-of-order[ 4] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 38437[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 27.2 MBytes 22.8 Mbits/sec 1.837 ms 0/19418 (0%)[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 1 datagrams received out-of-order[ 3] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 45356[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 28.8 MBytes 24.1 Mbits/sec 1.319 ms 0/20555 (0%)[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1 datagrams received out-of-order
B43 Open Source DriverTCP
------------------------------------------------------------
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 42345
[ 4] 0.0-10.1 sec 19.6 MBytes 16.4 Mbits/sec
[ 5] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 42346
[ 5] 0.0-10.2 sec 23.1 MBytes 19.0 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 42347
[ 4] 0.0-10.2 sec 21.7 MBytes 17.8 Mbits/secUDP
------------------------------------------------------------
Receiving 1470 byte datagrams
UDP buffer size: 375 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------[ 3] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 57459
[ 3] 0.0-10.1 sec 14.0 MBytes 11.7 Mbits/sec 0.438 ms 152/10171 (1.5%)
[ 3] 0.0-10.1 sec 1 datagrams received out-of-order
[ 4] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 55062
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 15.7 MBytes 13.1 Mbits/sec 1.372 ms 205/11373 (1.8%)
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 1 datagrams received out-of-order
[ 3] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 49861
[ 3] 0.0-10.1 sec 23.4 MBytes 19.5 Mbits/sec 3.724 ms 292/17017 (1.7%)
[ 3] 0.0-10.1 sec 1 datagrams received out-of-order
[ 4] local 192.168.178.24 port 5001 connected with 192.168.178.34 port 42069
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 21.5 MBytes 18.0 Mbits/sec 1.370 ms 239/15544 (1.5%)
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 1 datagrams received out-of-order
As you can see, the proprietary driver is slightly faster in TCP mode. And somehow they're both really slow in UDP mode. That's something I'd like to find out more about.
Update: That was my fault. For some reason iperf restricts UDP tests to 1 Mbit/s. Now the results are more appropriate. The result is that the proprietary driver has a more stable connection speed.
But I think that's really not worth installing a proprietary driver. Broadcom really would better integrate the changes into the open source driver. Their driver is still relying on the deprecated wireless system anyway.
Update2: Further tests showed that, at least after a while of usage, the proprietary driver creates high network latencies. Ping times to the router went up from 2 ms to an average of 160ms (peaks of 500ms !).
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "intel"
Option "FramebufferCompression" "off" # on for battery, off for multi-display
Option "monitor-LVDS" "internal"
Option "monitor-VGA" "external"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "internal"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "external"
Option "RightOf" "internal" #the left display is the primary one
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "internal"
Device "Configured Video Device"
SubSection "Display"
Virtual 2560 1024
# this should be as large as both displays next to each other
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "ServerFlags"
# Option "Xinerama" "true" # crashes
Option "AIGLX" "false" # crashes multi-head
EndSection
sudo su -c "echo 'deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/intrepid.list"
apt-get update
apt-get install webkitkde
sudo su -c "echo > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/intrepid.list"
apt-get update
# workarounf for hardy
cd /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/services/
sudo ln -s /usr/share/kde4/services/webkitpart.desktop .
cd /usr/lib/kde4/lib/kde4/
sudo ln -s ../../webkitkdepart.so
# now the fine-tuning
cd /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/apps/ && sudo ln -s /usr/share/kde4/apps/webkitpart
cd /usr/lib/kde4/share/icons/hicolor/ && for i in 16x16 32x32 48x48 64x64 128x128; do cd $i/apps; sudo ln -s /usr/share/icons/hicolor/"$i"/apps/webkit.png; cd ../..; done;
kbuildsycoca4
sudo rm /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/services/webkitpart.desktop /usr/lib/kde4/lib/kde4/webkitkdepart.so /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/apps/webkitpart
cd /usr/lib/kde4/share/icons/hicolor/ && for i in 16x16 32x32 48x48 64x64 128x128; do cd $i/apps; sudo rm webkit.png; cd ../..; done;
sudo apt-get purge webkitkde