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After getting xorg 7 working on my laptop strange things have been happening:
- my network card does not always work at startup
- my wireless card does not always work
- plugging in an exteral usb mouse is not working
- automounting is acting a little flakey, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

I'm seriously considering switching to another distro for my laptop. It's a shame because I really like Arch and the people behind it. In fact I just donated some money to the project. It will stay on my main workstation. I'm currently weighing my options for my laptop. I'm might have to try Ubuntu or Slackware again. I might even try Kanotix on it. I guess bleeding edge isn't always good. I'm a little bummed out right now.

Can't go wrong with Slackware. 10.2 is nice and stable, but if you want bleeding edge stuff you can always try current. You could also try Debian testing if you don't want to be quite as bleeding edge as Arch is. I ran it for about 4 months and it's rock solid.

Patrick wrote:After getting xorg 7 working on my laptop strange things have been happening:
- my network card does not always work at startup
- my wireless card does not always work
- plugging in an exteral usb mouse is not working
- automounting is acting a little flakey, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

I'm seriously considering switching to another distro for my laptop. It's a shame because I really like Arch and the people behind it. In fact I just donated some money to the project. It will stay on my main workstation. I'm currently weighing my options for my laptop. I'm might have to try Ubuntu or Slackware again. I might even try Kanotix on it. I guess bleeding edge isn't always good. I'm a little bummed out right now.

SUSE dude, I'm telling ya!

If you get 10.0, there's KDE 3.5 packages for it, and a lot of good stuff, might not be as fast as Slackware, but works very well on pretty much every single laptop I've tried it on, with the wireless working. Out-of-the-box multimedia support is not very good, but I'd say Ubuntu is worse in this case, SUSE at least have some limited mp3 support.

Remember if you don't like YaST you can always just install apt4rpm, which by the way is included on the SUSE discs, and use that as a wrapper for RPM (apt-get is a wrapper for dpkg on Debian, in my mind).

I actually recently got two of my friends to abandon Windows completely and run Linux, one of them came to me and said "Troels, I'm tired of Windows, I wanna try Linux again, what distribution should I use?" I went ahead and sent him some links to SUSE, he installed it and I helped him tweak the multimedia support, and now he's totally in love with it. My second friend was sort of like "It takes too much time to learn all that stuff", "I need to have dual boot...." then I told him to just run VMware, and he agreed to wipe out Windows and install SUSE 10, I tell ya I seriously think he's litterally in love with it, he havn't even used VMware yet, I just installed it and multimedia stuff through SSH for him, and now he's just in love with amaroK, Konqueror and all that good stuff. These two examples are enough for me to say that SUSE is great for newbies, because it's easy to guide them through installing the codecs, or just making them enable SSH and you do it for them. And for me, as an advanced user, it's great too.

By the way Pat, if you like the idea of desktop search, try SUSE 10.1 when it's out, it will have a KDE frontend for Beagle (Beta 1 Screenshot, An in-use screenshot) as I posted yesterday, which is already integrated with KMail, Konqueror's browser history and the KAddressbook, and of course the more GNOMEish apps, such as Firefox, Evolution, Thunderbird......

10.1 is far from done, right now it seems they reverted it back close to alpha stage, because I think Novell may have wanted some new stuff in the SUSE codebase ASAP, it might be XGL, it might be the huge changes to the package manager that they're doing..... they're not saying much, but more testing usually results in a more solid distro.

Patrick wrote:After getting xorg 7 working on my laptop strange things have been happening:
- my network card does not always work at startup
- my wireless card does not always work
- plugging in an exteral usb mouse is not working
- automounting is acting a little flakey, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

I'm seriously considering switching to another distro for my laptop. It's a shame because I really like Arch and the people behind it. In fact I just donated some money to the project. It will stay on my main workstation. I'm currently weighing my options for my laptop. I'm might have to try Ubuntu or Slackware again. I might even try Kanotix on it. I guess bleeding edge isn't always good. I'm a little bummed out right now.

Yeah, I had similar experiences. I love arch, but I just couldn't get it working correctly on my lappy. Most stuff worked fine, but there were a number of things that were issues as well. I sucked it up and put kubuntu back on my lappy. It's got loads of issues, but to their credit the (k)ubuntu guys really focus on laptop usability. I'm really hoping dapper fixes some of the problems I have with the distro.

I'm planning to upgrade my arch workstation to xorg7 this weekend - I'll be upgrading to the latest udev at the same time. I'm crossing my fingers and toes!!!

I'm convinced that, for me, it's either Arch or Slackware. I've learned so much about the "manual" way of things and enjoy the control I get from it, that it would take something revolutionary for me to change.

Because of what I've learned by using Arch, Slackware is pretty much a cake-walk for me now.

It's Arch or Slackware for me now.

Patrick wrote:After getting xorg 7 working on my laptop strange things have been happening:
- my network card does not always work at startup
- my wireless card does not always work
- plugging in an exteral usb mouse is not working
- automounting is acting a little flakey, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

I think your network problems are related to the recent udev changes. Check out Mixed Up Devices, Sound/Network Cards Changing Order Each Boot in the Arch wiki.

It's been a really long time since I tried Gnome so I went and installed Ubuntu:
http://pdavila.homelinux.org/blog/?p=92

Pat,

I'll be very curious to hear your experiences with Ubuntu. I'll keep checking your blog.

Patrick wrote:After getting xorg 7 working on my laptop strange things have been happening:
- my network card does not always work at startup
- my wireless card does not always work
- plugging in an exteral usb mouse is not working
- automounting is acting a little flakey, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

Pretty much the same here. I was trying to get my USB pen drive to work. So per your advice I installed HAL and Dbus and added them to the daemons line in /etc/rc.conf. Rebooted, plugged in my USB key and nothing happens. Tried 'mount /media/LEXAR_MEDIA' and it complained that there was nothing in /etc/fstab about this drive.

Udev/HAL should see the USB key, create a device, make a mount point and put a line in /etc/fstab. I know I can manually fix this in /etc/fstab, but I shouldn't have to, and with Udev it can cause problems.

So I popped in a Fedora CD and in 30 minutes I had a fresh install. Logged in, plugged in my USB key, and it worked. I lose the advantages of a lightweight distro with Fedora, but I gain the advantage of having a system that works. I'm sure I could weather the problems with Arch and make it work, but I really don't have the time right now. I'm running the laptop without a GUI, so it's plenty fast for me.

Well, I'm mostly finished getting my system working again. The remaining weirdness is:

a) all of my font's are either too small, or too large unless I tweak my dot pitch in my xorg.conf and set my fonts to 15 or 16 point. I'm not real happy about this, but it's workable until I figure out what's borked.

b) None of my previous modlines work for my resolution. I'm using 1200x1024, and want to run it at 75 or 80hz. Simply adding that resolution to my screen section doesn't add it to available resolutions in KDE, and removing everything except 1200x1024 causes X to start at 2048x1536@85hz -- I'm DAMN glad that I didn't blow up my monitor! WTF is up with that?

I'll keep poking away...

Well, I fixed it. I removed ALL of my flippin' modlines, and magically things worked perfectly. Prior to this I'd installed *both* fontsize packages (75 and 100 dpi) so I guess I'm cool in either case -- I appear to be running at 96 dpi though.

Strange no one else had the modlines issue and posted about it one the forums or list.

Snarkout wrote:Yeah, I had similar experiences. I love arch, but I just couldn't get it working correctly on my lappy. Most stuff worked fine, but there were a number of things that were issues as well.

Everything worked perfectly until the 'upgrade' to the latest udev/xorg. After that it was all downhill. Laptops are finicky. Going forward I will be sticking with a 'stable' distro/release. Live and learn.

Ugh. No. I lied. I'm still not fixed. Now my goddamned ipod doesn't mount - it's recognized by udev, and I see what I expect to see in /var/log/messages.log but no mounting joy.

I'm losing my sense of humor here.

Ah, and now kmail, which I'd managed to convince to *only* crash dependably when I wanted to use the search function, is pegging the goddamned cpu at 100% while it's AFAICT idle.

I'm also seeing the supposedly fixed kicker crash at logout again. I have no idea wtf is up with that, since I personally haven't seen that since kde 3.4.0, and it was supposed to be "fixed" by 3.5.1. Lo and behold, when I log out now, I get a black screen for 30+ seconds followed by a crash screen. Sweetass.

So, how's slackware these days?

Sorry to hear you're having so many troubles these days. Times like that are really frustrating. What if you reinstalled Arch from scratch and then just did some selective updates not including xorg/udev/hal etc.?

Snarkout wrote:So, how's slackware these days?

Quietly rolling along, as usual. Nothing fancy, but stable. Pat V. is actively working on -current (a few more little updates yesterday). I would imagine 11.0 will be released in April/May timeframe more or less. I have 10.2 with some selected updates from -current working great. I don't use KDE so I can't comment on that specifically. In reading through the Slack forums on LQ, some users have compiled KDE 3.5.1 from source and are having problems, but Pat V's 3.5.1 packages in -current seem to work flawlessly from what I can tell.