[PC-BSD Testing] PCBSD 8.0-RC-x64 -- Various Problems

[Kris Moore]

On 01/31/2010 14:34, Ian Robinson wrote:
> PCBSD 8.0-RC-x64 (Fresh Install)
> Dual Xeon 64-bit processor @ 3.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM
> Video Adapter = NVidia Quadro FX 3400 w/ 256 Mb memory
>
> The following problems have appeared in my system since the BETA version:
>
> 1.  Screen Rendering Delay:  Screen rendering is generally slow.  For
> example, there is a five to ten second delay after clicking on Start Menu
> (Kickoff Application Launcher) for it to expand, and after trying to move
> from one tab to the other (for example, moving from Favorites to
> Applications).
>
> 2. Screen color contamination:  The menu background (white) is often
> contaminated with 1/2" stripes the same color as the desktop screen.  In
> terminal (green letters on black bckgrnd), it will occasionally generate a
> 1/2" wide stripe matching the colors of the desktop screen.

Doe these issues also occur with "nv" driver, or with compositing disabled?

> 3. KM Player:  Buttons for "Play" and "Pause" are virtually invisible unlike
> the "Stop" button which has black insets and borders.  All the other buttons
> have visibly colored icons.
>


That's a design problem in kmplayer sounds like, might want to shoot the 
developer a notice :)

http://kmplayer.kde.org/


> 4.  Web Pages Slow to Load:  Delay in getting web pages to load and in
> saving images to disk (i.e., waiting for save dialog window to appear).
>
> 5. Menu background contamination:  The menu background (white) is often
> contaminated with 1/2" stripes the same color as the desktop screen.

Ditto for drivers, does switching to "nv" or disabling compositing help?

> 6.  System Manager:  Displays incorrect system memory.  Although the
> computer has 4 GB of memory, system manager reports on 768 MB.

Fixed!

> 7. Dolphin Admin:  Could  not delete files.  Error message said "Could not
> start process.  Cannot talk to Klauncher:  Not connected to DBus Server.

Fixed!

> 8. KMix:  Sound Mixer (KMix) will not load from the menus.  However, it will
> load if you click on the speaker icon next to the clock and chose mixer from
> there.

I see that here as well, their doesn't appear to be a -- flag we can use 
to force it to open the mixer dialog though, it defaults to only showing 
the system-tray icon, not sure what I can do about that.


>
> The following problems existed in previous testing versions of PCBSD 8.0 and
> still exist:
>
> 9. Dolphin Admin:  Could not start text editor in Dolphin Admin.  Error
> message said:  "KDEInit could not launch 'usr/local/kde4/bin/kwrite'"

Fixed in SVN!

Grab and replace this file:

http://trac.pcbsd.org/export/6143/pcbsd/trunk/system-overlay/usr/local/kde4/share/applications/kde4/sudolphin.desktop

Put it in /usr/local/kde4/share/applications/kde4/, and run 
"kbuildsycoca4", it should start working properly now.

> 10.  Sound card -- No sound.  The sound card is an Intel ICH5 (AC'97).
> Sound support is enabled in /boot/loader.conf and /etc/rc.conf.  I've
> confirmed that the sound card is recognized by the system, that the speakers
> are on, that the speaker inputs/computer outputs are connected, that the
> mixer volumes are "up" and not muted.  I've tried different sets of speakers
> known to work.  The sound card&  speakers worked under PCBSD 7.1.1.
>
>

I'm at a loss on this one. I don't know enough about sound-driver 
internals to help debug it properly. I would recommend posting the 
output of "dmesg", "cat /dev/sndstat" and "pciconf -lv" to the freebsd 
multimedia list:

http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-multimedia

Hopefully one of the driver devs knows why this got broken in the 8.0 
driver, and maybe has a configuration workaround we can incorporate :)

-- 

Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software
http://www.pcbsd.com