But I updated to the KDE 4.2 beta2 packages again today and am absolutely loving OpenSUSE 11.1. Things are blazingly fast and well-put-together, and best of all, my faith is totally restored in OpenSUSE after I reinstalled from scratch again. So what changed between my last post and now? A few things:

Yesterday when I installed the KDE 4.2 beta2 packages, I also pulled in the unstable Qt45 packages as well. Maybe that caused some harm? *shrug* All I know is today, I didn’t do that and I’m not seeing any problems.

I think I was using my old xorg.conf file (that worked perfectly well in OpenSUSE 11.0, mind you) yesterday, which still had a bunch of tweaks that I added over the last year to get nVidia to play nicely with KDE4. Today, I am just using the default xorg.conf, as written by sax2, and things are REALLY fast and stable. And based on a few comments I’ve seen (hi jospoortvliet!), it’s very likely that this is the true cause of my problems from yesterday. Here’s what my old Screen stanza looked like. Does anyone know exactly which one of these might be causing nVidia to hurl its little guts out in OpenSUSE 11.1 with xorg 7.4?

Section “Screen”
Identifier     “Screen0″
Device         “Device0″
Monitor        “Monitor0″
DefaultDepth    24
Option         “RenderAccel” “True”
Option         “UseEdidFreqs” “False”
Option         “TwinView” “1″
Option         “TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder” “DFP, CRT”
Option         “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”
Option         “DisableGLXRootClipping” “True”
Option         “DamageEvents” “True”
Option         “TripleBuffer” “True”
Option         “UseEvents” “True”
Option         “FlatPanelProperties” “DFP: Scaling = Centered; CRT: Scaling = Centered, Dithering = Enabled”
Option         “OnDemandVBlankInterrupts” “True”
Option         “PixmapCacheSize” “2000000″
Option         “AllowSHMPixmaps” “False”
Option         “BackingStore” “True”
Option         “metamodes” “CRT: 1680×1050 +0+0, DFP: 1680×1050 +0+0″
SubSection     “Display”
Depth       24
EndSubSection
EndSection

So, in addition to things being extremely awesome in general in OpenSUSE 11.1, I am totally thrilled to finally be able to use powerdevil (it is REALLY nice!!!), and really happy to finally have working hotplug/usb-drive mounting working in KDE 4.2!!!! (it failed hard in OpenSUSE 11.0 due to some hal permissions problems that I never figured out), and zypper (package management) seems to be even faster in OpenSUSE 11.1. And these are just a few of the things that I’ve noticed in the last couple of hours of X not crashing. =;)

And, of course, KDE 4.2 is continuing to to shape up and look, feel, and perform absolutely marvelously, and OpenSUSE 11.1′s beta2 packages are a great way of testing it out.

As for me, I’m just thankful to have a functional laptop again and I hope to get some good KPilot testing and bug squashing done during the next few days of Christmas vacation.

Merry <almost> Christmas, all, and to the OpenSUSE 11.1 guys, a huge thanks again for the awesome new distro. You guys just plain rock! =:)

First off, I have a laptop (meaning I cant change the video card) with an nVidia chipset (meaning I’d like to change the video card). So while OpenSUSE 11.1 works really nicely with the open source “nv” video driver, it can’t do any compositing, 3d, OpenGL, etc., etc. (meaning no wobbley windows or cube goodness or translucency or… you get the idea…).  So I followed these nice little 1-click instructions and installed the latest stable nVidia drivers, rebooted, and up came X with nVidia’s drivers quite nicely. So far so good. And then I clicked “logout”. And that’s where things started to fall apart. It looks like what’s happening is that nVidia’s X driver gets killed when logging out and trying to log back in again. I poked around a bit and saw in a log somewhere that kdm was timing out waiting for X and ended up giving up. So I bumped up some values in /usr/share/kde4/config/kdm/kdmrc in the “X-:*-Core” section (Core config for local displays). I changed ServerAttempts to 5 and ServerTimeout to 45, and it seems to help. Mind you, the underlying problem is still there, and X takes a LOOOOONG time to restart with the nVidia drivers, but at least this keeps kdm from failing altogether and me from getting stuck without an X session and an unusable console display (when this happens, and I’ve booted with the default vga= line, the console is totally unusable).

Secondly, one of the main reasons for my sticking with OpenSUSE is its exceptional support for KDE 4.2/trunk packages. So I installed a bunch of stuff from the KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE:Desktop repository and discovered that X crashes far too randomly and regularly. This, combined with the above problem of X being unable to restart, using the nVidia drivers, made for a lot of ugliness. I reinstalled once already and am a little leery of bringing in the unstable 4.2/trunk packages. And yes, I’m aware that I’m trying to use something labelled quite clearly as “UNSTABLE”, but I’ve been using OpenSUSE’s excellent “UNSTABLE” KDE 4.2/trunk packages for 6+ months now without any problems whatsoever. And it’s been with the same version of the nVidia driver as I am now using. So… it must be something in the new versions of the kernel or xorg packages that’s causing problems? Is anyone else seeing this other than this guy (who never got his questions answered)?

Anyway, I’m going to spend another few days trying to iron things out. If anyone “out there” has any helpful hints or suggestions, I’d really appreciate them via comment. And, yeah, once I figure out what’s going wrong, I’ll look into filing bugs for this stuff…

Nuts.

If I was made of money, I’d be sorely tempted now to go looking for a personal laptop to replace this frustrating hunk of Thinkpad with. New macbooks come out on Tuesday, no?

Holy crap. KDE 4.2 frickin’ flies! And contrary to my previous post, now if I set IPP=2, everything’s blazing fast and I’m actually able to resize konsole again! WooooooT!!!  YAY progress!!!

[[ UPDATE ]] : Added link to my previous post. I had already posted my xorg.conf settings and since then, the only thing I’ve changed was IPP=2 from IPP=1. HTH!

Thanks to the folks at nVidia who are diligently working on improving the problems in their drivers!!

Anyway, I’ve followed everything I could find on Lemma’s techbase pages and in the nVidia forums, but nothing has worked. Until now!

I’m running the latest beta from nVidia (177.78). I also discovered that for me, contrary to what everyone else seems to be saying, if I use InitialPixmapPlacement=2, performance is MUCH worse than if I use InitialPixmapPlacement=1. Using the benchmarking tools from the techbase page, I found that on the Penrose Tiling test, using Opera, the Canvas test would take up to 30 seconds for me if I did “nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1″ before running it. However, if I did “nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=1 -a GlyphCache=1″ instead, then the Canvas test only took around 2.5 seconds. WOW! So I added “nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=1 -a GlyphCache=1″ to my X startup script and was very pleased to discover that KDE 4.2 now is VERY usable on my little laptop!!! Again, HUZZAH!!!

For completeness, then, here is the Screen section  from my xorg.conf:

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Device0″
Monitor “Monitor0″
DefaultDepth 24
Option “RenderAccel” “True”
#Option “RandRRotation” “True”
Option “UseEdidFreqs” “False”
#Option “UseInt10Module” “True”
Option “TwinView” “1″
#Option “TwinViewOrientation” “Clone”
Option “TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder” “DFP-0″
#Option “UseCompositeWrapper” “True”
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”
Option “DisableGLXRootClipping” “True”
Option “DamageEvents” “True”
Option “TripleBuffer” “True”
Option “UseEvents” “True”
#Option “DynamicTwinView” “True”
Option “FlatPanelProperties” “DFP: Scaling = Centered; CRT: Scaling = Centered, Dithering = Enabled”
Option “OnDemandVBlankInterrupts” “True”
Option “PixmapCacheSize” “2000000″
Option “AllowSHMPixmaps” “False”
Option “BackingStore” “True”
#Option “NvAGP” “3″
#Option “ConnectedMonitor” “DFP”
Option “metamodes” “CRT: 1680×1050 +0+0, DFP: 1680×1050 +0+0″

SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

To be honest, I am not 100% sure which of the recently-changed variables in my setup have resulted in this improving so drastically–whether the new nVidia driver beta (177.78), the xorg.conf changes, or the InitialPixmapPlacement=1 change–but the end result is that I’m now able to use KDE 4.2 (trunk) quite happily and I’m thoroughly stoked about it.

Hope this helps some other poor soul out there. Oh–also, does it sound far-fetched that IPP=1 would work better for me than IPP=2??