[Mageia-dev] installing DVD x86_64 KDE

AL13N alien at rmail.be
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.


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