Problem 13: unclean shut-downs

This is a very appropriate problem number ;-) Once every 3-4 shutdowns my KDE refuses to close - it just seems to sit there doing nothing; all windows by KNotes are gone, but other processes such as kio_imap (remained of Kmail) or even Konsole still run in the background. If I switch to a text console and reboot (using either crtl-alt-del or reboot command), everything seems to go well till almost the last minute when it suddenly prints something like
"oops... could not unmount /: device or system busy"

I can't see this in the log because the logger shuts down before that. My computer turns off immediately after, and then replays hundreds of transactions with ReiserFS. Nothing suspicious appears in the log before the logger quits.

I checked my hard drive with smartctl, and it reports that my hardware is OK (of course, it could be wrong). The problem is not easy to reproduce, either, so I am now living with my fingers crossed that it does not kill my hard drive one day.

Wireless/Networkmanager problem solved

As it turned out, with Network Manager my wireless issue Iproblem 12) was worse than I had thought - it absolutely refused to load the ipw2200 module on boot, so there would be no wireless until I run "modprobe ipw2200". I solved it by modifying my /etc/init.d/network, inserting the modprobe command on top as discussed on the opensuse ndiswrapper page, "loading ndiswrapper on boot" section.

Wireless and Network Manager

OK, so Network Manager works fine. But it does not solve my wireless problem - if I boot up with my wireless switch off, there is nothing I can do to turn it on. modprobe ipw2100 does not seem to help. Going into yast, fiddling with settings so that it re-runs all the scripts helps, but that is a hassle. I wonder if this is because I was forced to disable that hotkey-setup module? More investigation to do, I guess.

Problem 12: wireless off on startup means no wireless at all

OK, here we go with a new problem: I just booted a machine with my wireless switch in the "off" position. No wireless interface was created, and turning the switch to "on" did not help. I had to go into YaST to try to change configuration settings, after that it run something (modprobe, maybe?) which caused the my wireless card to be visible. After that the switch worked just fine. It was not a problem in 10.0 - there I could easily boot with my wireless off, and then turn it on later. I do see a message about failing to set up eth1 during boot. Interestingly, when I was running installation, the kernel saw the card even when the switch was off - so it should be detectable. Haven't figured out what's wrong there yet. I wonder if it would be better with Network Manager?

Wireless with KInternet

Just tested wireless with KInternet - this is one thing that seems to be working better than 10.0. I needed to re-run the configuration, but once I did it, it seemed to remember my WEP key just fine, where in 10.0 I had to re-enter it often, for no clear reason, because it seemed to think that network had no encryption, even though everything was set up properly in YaST. I will try the nextwork manager sometime later - I'd like to switch to a newer program if I can.

Logging and konsole problems solved

I have logging again (my problem 4) solved with that change to apparmor configuration), and fonts on my konsole (problem 5) are readable again after I changed sizes and saved the session.

Updating from 10.0 to 10.3

I decided to update from 10.0 to 10.3 directly. I skipped 10.1 because another person in our group had endless issues with software updater crashing. I skipped 10.2 because when I installed it to my Mom's laptop, it gave me a lot of trouble with networking (a PCMCIA card didn't work with an annoying log message "get a better card!"), as well as continued having trouble with the software updater. By my kernel and packages have gotten old, I cannot install the newest Skype, so I decided it was time to upgrade my laptop.

Unfortunately, lots and lots of things don't work. I find it very annoying - on this particular computer, both SuSE 9.3 and OpenSuse 10.0 were very stable and didn't give me any trouble at all. But now it seems that all the improvements are actually making my system less stable, and applications I depend on, like emacs, are changing functionality in ways that make my life more difficult.

Problem1: KMail. Crashed on startup, before I could do anything. After some experimentation, I determined that my cached IMAP account was a problem. I solved this by deleting ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap but then had to endure a repeat sync. Since I have over 10,000 messages across all my folders, and my internet is currently very slow (shame on Virgin.net, I am changing soon), this took ages. Then all my keybindings were lost. I re-defined several, but Shift-R still refuses to work for "reply to all", for unclear reasons. At least it's not "reply without quote" - that was the new binding which confused me for quite a while.

Problem2: freeze on reboot. It took me 2 tries to even figure out what happens. As soon as hotkey-setup starts on boot, my caps-lock and scroll-lock lights start flashing, and the system freezes completely. This is not a problem in fail-safe mode, but I hate to lose my ACPI. So I temporarily disabled hotkey-setup in YaST until I can find a better solution. I think I can live without the special function keys ;-)

Problem 3: Java not working in Firefox. I have java version 1.5.0_13, and Java plugin is installed. But when I load pages in Firefox with applets that worked on 10.0, nothing happens - the page stays empty. These pages work in Konqueror, so it appears to be a Firefox problem. Unfortunately, there is no Java console for this java build, so I cannot help it. I am putting this off until a better time - or possibly until I decide to move up to 1.6

Problem 4: no logging. Absolutely no messages are appended to /var/log/messages. Apparently this is a known problem if you are running syslog. The default for new installs is syslogd-ng, but since I upgraded from an earlier version, I had syslogd enabled. The fix is to add "k" to the line starting with "syslog" in /ets/apparmor.d/sbin.syslogd. I just put it in, but I haven't tested this yet - I need to reboot first. More info is in bugzilla entry "syslogd can't lock syslogd.pid"

Problem 5: very small fonts in konsole. My fonts looked just fine on 10.0, but now they are tiny and next to impossible to read. Changing the global settings in the KDE control centre does not have any impact on my Konsole. At a guess this is because it is part of a previously saved session. But then why are my fonts suddenly unreadable? I am planning to increase the font manually on each tab (6 of them, sigh) and then try to save the session, see if it works.

Problem6: very slow emacs startup. Loading emacs now seems to take ages. First I had to spend a while cleaning my .emacs file, because it turned out that lazy-font-lock option was removed and it was crashing it. Once I finally found the problem, it now works, but seems to load an incredible number of packages and takes a minute to start (where it used to be a couple of seconds). I guess I need to re-check my .emacs again to see if there is anything else to remove.

Problem7: C-x x binding gone from Emacs 22.1.1. I am very used to using this one, copying text into register and pasting it, sometimes using 2 or 3 registers. But now this binding is gone altogether. I need to investigate if I can bring it back

Problem8: extremely unstable KDE. During this day, I had at least 3 instances where Konqueror, Konsole and the main panel all stopped and refused to respond to keyboard and mouse, so I could not even log out. I could change to a text-based console and reboot, but that was it. No solution yet - hope to see something in system logs after I reboot.

Problem9: crashes during system shutdowns. Twice today when I restarted the system, the process went fine for a while, and then the system rebooted itself before unmounting the hard drives. No data damage so far, but it had to replay a huge number of transactions on my root partition. Again, no way to trace it until logging works - hopefully I will see something after the logger works.

Problem10: random lockups in SuSEConfig. Again, had it freeze 4 times at different scripts: either fontconfig or gtk2.config. The scripts just went into "wait" state and hang on there indefinitely. Killing them and re-running the script after reboot seemed to fix the problem. Again, need logging to find out more

Problem 11: very long startup times for YaST package manager. It seems to want to download lots of stuff because it wants to sync with many online repositories. I am planning to turn off automatic refresh on most of them, but I want to figure out first if there are any where the automatic refresh is essential (e.g. the update repository?)

Problem11a: lots of things are not checked yet. Will my camera work? I had a foiltex package, which depended on tetex, and may need to be updated for livetex. Beegle indexer either does not work, or takes 100% CPU - I didn't use it before, so I need to read the documentation and find out what's going on there. Mike not tested yet, nor is my wireless. After my 10.2 experience with Network Manager (on a different machine, sure) I am reluctant to try it here until I at least fix the logging, and preferably also fix other instabilities. I guess there will be more posts in the future ;-)

What is this blog about?

I finally decided to start posting information about my experience running OpenSuse on a Sony Vaio PCG-V505DP machine. I have been with SuSE since early days (I started with SuSE 6, or maybe even 5 - don't remember by now), and it has been the most stable distribution that I knew of that usually supported my hardware where others didn't. Sadly, it's no longer true - since 10.0, every new version seems to come up with additional problems, and there are more problems with each version, at least on the laptops I use. So I decided to start this, to have a permanent record of problems and solutions.