Xserver issues: 96 dpi vs. 133 dpi, nv vs. nvidia

Since some weeks I occasionally run Intrepid Ibex on my Lifebook (booting from my test partition). I installed the box with defaults only. Having
lulu:/home/bav> lspci | grep -i nvidia
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8400M G (rev a1)

Intrepid used the free nv-Driver:

lulu:/home/bav> less /var/log/Xorg.0.log
...
(II) LoadModule: "nv"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nv_drv.so
...


This worked, but surprisingly I got


(==) NV(0): DPI set to (96, 96)


which is simply wrong. The Lifebook has 133 dpi.

As I could not fix this, I quickly installed the nonfree NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, package nvidia-glx-177.

With this driver, I got correctly 133 dpi. Everything seemed fine …

I then realized, that changing the screen’s brightness no longer worked. It worked fine as long as I used the free nv driver. Now with the nonfree NVIDIA driver, the screen did not change brightness any longer.

Unfortunately there are situations, where the Lifebook’s screen stays dark (e.g. maybe after disconnecting from docking station). As I was not able to switch the screen brighter I had to reboot in this situation

I uninstalled nvidia-glx-177 and started over with nv. Changing values in /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness worked as seen before but I was not able to find the right place to start X with 133 dpi.

Finally I got the tip to use Xfce 4 Settings Manager | User Interface | DPI. It had the value System Default. After I changed it all XFCE and Gnome applications were fine. Firefox and Thunderbird too.
Some other (e.g. emacs) still need some fine tuning.

I have no idea what xfce does here behind the scenes. Obviously the X-Server stills runs with 96dpi …

Complex systems tend to appear full of mystery …

Exploring the Asus EEE PC 900A with Xandros Linux

If you are interested in that topic, you might like to visit

http://eeex.ohost.de

Update: My EEE is broken, so currently no news on that page right now.

Update2: I finally got a new EEE, it’s running now with Intrepid Ibex.

Update3: If you run your EEE 900A with BIOS version 0403 (08/04/2008) you really should consider to update to 0607 (09/24/08). See above site for details.

sudo Trouble: Always asking for password despite NOPASSWD

Yes, I’m too lazy: I love NOPASSWD in my sudoers. Yes, this is bad security practice. Anyway, after installing Hardy I couldn’t make it work.

Finally I found that sudo takes the last appropriate entry that matches, not the first, as other tools do.

So after moving my custom sudoers rule to the end of /etc/sudoers, I now can continue my bad habits …

gnome-screensaver stays always black: lots of segfaults

Running xfce on my new Lifebook, I was completely locked out after I ran xflock4 (which in turn calls gnome-screensaver-command –lock).

Back to the prompt I saw a lot of segfaults reported by the kernel like this one:

May 19 12:54:07 lulu kernel: [ 1166.757433] gnome-screensav[8313]:
segfault at 31 rip 7f8a51b1c8d4 rsp 7fff5b3d9a10 error 4

Fortunately using xscreensaver instead of gnome-screensaver is a work around.

Firefox 3 kills http server of a server device

Running Hardy means using Firefox 3 Beta 5 per default. When I first visited the http-server of one of the devices in my customers datacenter, the screen was frozen after a second. Unfortunately the device’s http-server stayed frozen. There was no further connection possible. Even worse: This could be fixed only by cutting the device’s power.

Currently I have no idea how to work around.

Edit:

There is a workaround. Install firefox-2. Set up a new profile foobar:

firefox -profilemanager -no-remote firefox

Start firefox-2 like this:

firefox-2 -P foobar -no-remote &

Java application issues: Lifebook reinstalled with i386

Yesterday I had my new Lifebook the first day in production. Unfortunately I had issues with a Java application which refused to start with the default Java in Hardy (I have to run Avocent DSView 3 to get server consoles and this is implemented in Java …).

So with openjdk-6-jre etc. and icedtea-gcjwebplugin as Web Browser Plugin
the application hung while loading. So I tried to switch back to sun-java5-jre but I had to learn that there is no package sun-java5-plugin for x86_64.

I can’t live without that ugly application – so in the evening I reinstalled my Lifebook with i386.

This is not fun – suggestions welcome !

Intel Core Duo / Santa Rosa: Fan always at max. speed until nvidia-glx-new was installed

My shiny brandnew Fujitsu Lifebook E8410 running Ubuntu Hardy has a significant drawback:  As soon as GRUB takes over control the fan starts to run at maximum speed. It runs at maximum all the time Hardy is up. When I shutdown the system it will turn down just before the system is powered off.

See my bug report at Launchpad.

There seems to be a workaround: After I installed nvidia-glx-new, the fan goes down as soon as the X-Server is started !!!

But I’m unsure about this workaround. acpi -V always gives me 27 °C for the CPU. On a HP notebook with the same chipset I saw

Thermal 1: ok, 36.0 degrees C
Thermal 2: ok, 37.0 degrees C
Thermal 3: ok, 50.0 degrees C
Thermal 4: active[3], 45.0 degrees C
Thermal 5: ok, 40.0 degrees C

dmesg says:


[ 62.903304] CPU0: Thermal monitoring handled by SMI
[ 63.494350] CPU1: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM2)
[ 65.594267] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ3] (42 C)
[ 65.597322] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ4] (40 C)
[ 65.598384] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ5] (0 C)
[ 65.606739] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ0] (61 C)
[ 65.610104] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ1] (59 C)


5 thermal zones !

The Fujitsu tells me

root@lulu:/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ00# dmesg | grep -i therm
[ 17.074771] CPU0: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM2)
[ 17.517967] CPU1: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM2)
[ 19.371052] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ00] (27 C)
[ 19.371330] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ01] (27 C)


root@lulu:/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ00# cat trip_points
critical (S5): 100 C
passive: 95 C: tc1=0 tc2=10 tsp=2 devices=CPU0 CPU1


Is this reasonable ?

P.S.:

Due to some java incompabilities I had to reinstall my Lifebook using i386. Nothing changed. Fan runs at maximum speed until I installed nvidia-glx-new.

P.P.S.:

I finally returned the Lifebook. The new one (with unchanged software) behaves different. The fan still runs at high speed during BIOS, Grub and early stages of boot, but it does not bother me. The fan turns down then. This is true for my current fully patched Hardy with nvidia-glx-new AND it is true for Intrepid Ibex Alfa 5 without nvidia-glx-new.

P.P.P.S.:

acpi -V on II shows completely bogus data.

WLAN works no longer – lots of: wlan0: RX WEP frame, decrypt failed

When I installed Hardy first on my Lifebook, I chose i386. wlan worked out of the box. Due to the fan issue I reinstalled using x86_64. As described the fan turned down as soon as the non free Nvidia driver was installed. With this configuration wlan does no longer work.

Using the Hardy x86_64 lifecd is fine.

dmesg says:
wlan0: RX WEP frame, decrypt failed

No solution yet.

There is a solution. It is very simple: I doublechecked my WLAN key – but there was a typo.

Skype / Listening via Headphone

Next I installed skype-static. I used this package because I do not want to have all KDE-libraries and their dependencies on the box (I normally avoid KDE apps).

Doing a Skype test call led to a next issue: The speakers did not mute when a headphone was plugged in. According to

root@lulu:/home/bavn# lspci | grep -i audio
Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)

and

root@lulu:/proc/asound/card0# grep -i codec codec#0
Codec: Realtek ALC262

dmesg told me:

hda_codec: Unknown model for ALC262, trying auto-probe from BIOS...


As a workaround configure the model parameter of the snd-hda-intel driver:

root@lulu:/home/bavn# tail -1 /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
options snd-hda-intel model=fujitsu

Since this is active, hda_codec no longer complains about unknown model. The speakers are automuted as soon as the headphone jack is plugged in.
in.

BTW, this is skype 2.0.0.68. It works well with the builtin video device of the Lifebook E8410. dmesg says:

uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device OEM Camera (046d:09b2)

Hardy on a Fujitsu Lifebook E8410

Recently I got an new Fujitsu Lifebook E8410. I wiped out the preinstalled Vista and installed Hardy. After the first problems came up I decided to share my experiences here in detail.

I hope that some people will find this helpful.