[Mageia-dev] installing DVD x86_64 KDE

Mon May 28 23:10:19 CEST 2012

Here are some tiny not that important remarks, stuff that i noticed during
+install:
+
+1. when starting the install, for usb-storage and something else + loading
+program, i'm in a textbased system. perhaps this can be improved.
+2. when selecting dutch language, you get keyboard layout belgian extra,
+but it's still US international that is selected.
+3. if you were to set english language, and chosen an other keyboard
+layout, you will still get back to the screen where the original keyboard
+layouts are there and selected. the one you chose in the others, is not
+there. this gives you the impression that your action didn't work, but
+pressing next does work, oddly enough.
+2. in partitioner, making a small boot is difficult with a 1TB disk in
+beginner mode; but i consider this normal, i doubt anyone basic will make
+a small boot partition.
+3. in the partition type selection criteria: a number of them are
+prepended by 'Journalised Filesystem:', some journalised ones (like btrfs)
+aren't.
+
+i chose:
+/boot: ext3: 330MB (primary)
+swap: swap: 8000MB (primary)
+/: ext4: 80000MB (primary)
+/home: btrfs: 300000MB
+(and let the rest be unpartitioned for now, otherwise the install will
+take too long for formatting)
+
+4. after next, i formatted
+5. i clicked KDE
+6. during install, there's pictures coming, but, there are more than 5,
+one of them is similar to the other, and the 5 dots below are seemingly in
+random order. It might be useful for next release to doublecheck these.
+(One of them says: Mageia hopes... we hope you like it)
+7. the transparency with the "arrows" is still odd
+...
+8. after completing the install, I chose no updates.
+9. during first boot, i got message: [drm] nouveau: GPU lockup switching
+to fbcon
+10. after that, the cauldron appeared.
+11. after that, i got a weird screen, which i took a pic of, harddisk
+seemed to be doing nothing, so after a few minutes, i tried moving mouse,
+or pressing CTRL+ALT+Fx or pressing ESC. all which didn't help, allthough
+numlock was still reacting.
+
+after some more time, i pinged the original ip address, thinking that i
+had a static lease for this PC, but knowing i had firewall enabled and ssh
+not yet set up, i knew ping wasn't gonna work. I tcpdumped to see what the
+arp traffic was, then pinged it.
+
+Sure enough, there was an arp reply for that ip address, making me think
+that it's likely working, but GPU made me unable to see what was going on.
+
+I decided to try to blindly log in in a tty.
+
+things i tried weren't really successful, maybe the keyboard didn't work
+too. after, i used the sysrqkeys S+U+B and that did work.
+
+next, i tried failsafe mode
+
+i saw it saying "Welcome to rescue mode.... etc."
+
+then "Started single.service" but nothing after that, (not able to login),
+and trying CTRL+ALT+Fx didn't show anyhing either.
+
+but then i noticed that i saw a prompt inbetween the messages. so pressing
+enter, showed me a nice prompt.
+
+since i had GPU lockup, i thought the best way is to get nvidia drivers
+installed.
+
+if upped the interface, did a dhclient on it. then removed my sources ( i
+hadn't chosen updates, so i only had the cdrom ) and added new ones.
+
+i removed the ignore line from tainted + nonfree and updated sources. then
+did urpmi --auto-select. (27 packages)
+
+after that, i did the XFdrake trick of selecting the same card again. it
+installed the dkms stuff (oddly enough, since the binary prebuild packages
+should've been enough?)
+
+after the dkms was completed, the monitor suddenly jumped to much smaller
+fonts (alot more lines)
+
+and after that, the nvidia prebuilt packages were installed anyway.
+
+after that, i got "your screen is too small for this app, restart it and
+continue"
+
+then "this program cannot be run in console mode"
+
+then "the program XFdrake crashed: can't call method "attron" on undefined
+value... in curses/ui/checkbox.pm" (i took a picture) (maybe it crashed,
+due to the urpmi output)
+
+I also noticed that kernel-server was chosen...
+
+thus, i restarted the XFdrake and this time it worked perfectly. i chose
+to disable CTRL+ALT+backspace and saved the configuration.
+
+then i rebooted and chose the normal (non-failsafe) and it worked.
+
+12. i had the printer connect and powered on at install time, but printer
+wasn't installed. I went to MCC and went to device info, nothing extra was
+shown or installed. i went to the printer thing and it asked me to install
+task-printing and such. after it was installed, it said:
+
+"printing service not available"
+
+with button "start service" (greyed out) and "connect"
+
+i chose connect and localhost and it worked... (odd)
+
+i clicked add printer, and it shows me my HP printer, then i press next
+and now it needs to install a bunch of other printing packages.
+
+printing test page worked.
+
+then i tried pressing the scanning button on the printer, which doesn't
+work. (maybe this doesn't work with linux)
+
+then i went to the scanning in MCC, expecting it to tell me that i should
+follow printing setup.
+
+it told me that my scanner isn't in the database, configure manually? i
+said yes and chose "most HP PSC's" and then it told me it was via printing
+setup.
+
+after, it showed 3 scanners: a TVcard, a webcam and my printer
+
+
+13. then i clicked the UPS thingie in MCC, being curious (i have an APC
+connected via USB on this machine)
+
+first it asked me to install nut-server, then to search, and it worked.
+
+after this it mentioned that "write support for user was incomplete"
+
+so that seemed to work, no app to actually see the results of it though,
+i'm left to find out if there's some kind of monitoring application for
+it.
+
+12b. back to the scanning:
+
+i started xsane, it gave me a list of those 3 scanners, so that seemed good.
+
+the first one was the scanner, so i clicked ok, but it seemed to hang on
+the OK button or something.
+
+i checked dmesg | less and saw that :
+A. nepomukservices had segfaulted
+B. WARNING at drivers/usb/host/ehci-hcd.c @ ehci_reset_endpoint with pid
+xsane
+
+this is strange, because the laptop with mga2 on it (well, rc updated) did
+work with scanning.
+
+i looked at systemd failed services and had 3:
+A. fedora-loadmodules
+B. lm_sensors
+C. microcode_ctl
+
+thinking about the kernel being server flavored and that ehci thing, i
+decided to switch to desktop flavor and reboot
+
+first, i installed openssh-server and then in mcc i set the firewall to
+accept ssh and ping, then i installed kernel-desktop-latest and removed
+the kernel-devel and dkms stuff while i was at it.
+
+rebooting
+
+and indeed, kernel-desktop seemed to make a difference, scanning now works
+well. (strangely enough, the ups stopped being detected)
+
+14. NFS mounts
+
+i had to restart nfs-common and rpcbind, for some reason, maybe related to
+statd.
+
+15. next is the webcam
+
+i had troubles getting ekiga to work nicely with my firewall (and siproxd)
+and the ekiga service, so i guess this is for another time.
+