Whirliwig’s Weblog

The MM10 sometimes wakes from suspend to chuck me out to the Gnome logon, losing my session. Then when I try logging on again, Gnome is broken.

I suspected XServer crashes. Yep according to /var/log/Xorg.0.log . Looked at internet. It’s sort of pear-shaped. Sorry, that was a pear I was looking at then. Googled it. Turns out the net is littered with veterans from the war against this one.

Looks like XServer is trying to do its own power management via ACPI, and that seems to get broken when other thingies are trying to suspend/resume at the same time. Still unconvinced. But here are the magical incantations:

In Xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
	Option "NoPM" "true"
EndSection

also, need to pass a flag to X at startup. X is started by the display manager (Gnome/gdm) in my case. On debian, gdm’s config is /etc/gdm/gdm.conf. It has several clauses for starting different flavours of X session. Change all of the lines of the following kind to add the -noacpi flag:

command=/usr/bin/X -noacpi -audit 0

About to try this. Wish me luck.

Credits: too numerous to mention. Try googling ‘x server crashes resume suspend’

UPDATE:

Didn’t work. Blah. If you want, try it. Others have found success.

After aptitude safe-upgrade , I’m downgraded to a previous version of NetworkManager, and network-applet-gnome. These don’t work on the MM10 with madwifi.

Luckily, disconnected as I was, I still had the snapshot sources for the two packages in /var/tmp …

I re-configured, rebuilt, ran make install

The lenny NetworkManager stuff installs into /usr/local/sbin, but my version went into /usr/sbin, because I used the following configure line:

./configure --enable-maintainer-mode --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var

So, to clean up:

cd /usr/local/sbin
mv NetworkManager NetworkManager.dontuse
mv NetworkManagerDispatcher NetworkManagerDispatcher.dontuse
ln -s /usr/sbin/NetworkManager /usr/sbin/NetworkManagerDispatcher .

Finally, ran restart:

/etc/init.d/NetworkManager restart

and off it goes, connecting. And here I am again! Byeeeeee.

I tried turning on ‘Nice Effects’ in Ubuntu’s Appearance preferences, but received an unhelpful ‘did not work’ error. I think that the next version of Gnome should have a random witticism generator instead. At least then it may disarm the urge to shout at the screen, fist clenched.

It turns out that ‘Nice Effects’ depends on Compiz, and my diddly laptop cannot handle that (at least Compiz won’t build). Bah!

The ‘Didn’t Work’ dialog, and the ‘Because of a Problem’ dialogs in Gnome remind me of a recalcitrant teen serving in a shop, who has been forced to do the job by his parents as they refused to continue supplementing his Mobile Phone account unless he got up and squeezed every ounce of oomph from his meagre motivational reservoir, and did something a little more productive than sitting in his darkened room listening to Emo Classics, Vol 3: The Best Depressing Music In the World, Ever…

Me in shop, to a young person of the above cast: “Excuse me, have you got this in blue?”
Teen: “Dunno…No.”,
Me: “Um, have you looked in the stock room?”,
Teen: “No”…

Have you noticed no matter how much weariness, sadness, irritation (or combination thereof) which you attempt to convey in your expression or voice at that point really doesn’t make any impression whatsoever? Then it dawns on you that this fragment of all of our futures truly does not see any issue, or reason to take further action. You’re an ex-problem.

Back to the Gnome example: the correct error message would be helpful and empathetic. In this case, it (the error message) would tell me—probably addressing me as ‘Sir’–how terribly sorry it was, but it could not fulfil my request as it was missing a vital component, and that unfortunately, to it’s eternal sadness, it cannot use that component on Sir’s behalf, as Sir’s hardware is shall we say, not quite the latest model (the error would pause to convey a potentially distressing fact, and to emphasise its regret). On the other hand, the error might continue, if Sir was in need of a lesser, but still most gratifying enhancement of Sir’s visual and graphical spectacle, then Sir might consider the package just down the road on the left, by the name of ‘xcompmgr’. The error would finish by saying, if Sir was to take possession of suitable hardware in the future, then Sir would of course be most welcome to return to this dialogue, whereupon the manager, Mr Gnome, would personally attend to his needs. Good day.

There you are, teen-boy-in-shop, that’s customer service!

xcompmgr

Some nice settings:

xcompmgr -cCfF -r4 -o.65 -l2 -t2 -D2

The incantations to make it work…

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
	Option	"Composite"	"Enable"
EndSection
...
Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Silicon Motion, Inc. SM720 Lynx3DM"
	Driver		"siliconmotion"
	Option		"UseBIOS"	"off"
	Option		"pci_burst"	"on"
	Option		"fifo_aggressive"	"on"
	Option		"RenderAccel"	"true"
	Option		"AllowGLXWithComposite"	"true"
	BusID		"PCI:0:9:0"
	VideoRam	16384
EndSection

The only thing in the Driver section that is (or may be) necessary is AllowGLXWithComposite. The rest are aggressive acceleration options for SiliconMotion, which do actually seem to speed things up.

I’m not sure about the VideoRam argument. This is stating that the siliconmotion driver should treat the inbuilt graphics card as though it has 16M of Video RAM, when in fact all of the specs show that the Lynx 3DM chip only has 8M of Video RAM. So what’s the point?

Like a lot of this, I don’t have the time to discover the reason, and so it remains a magical incantation that makes me feel better, and is gentler on the skin than repetitive hand-washing.

BTW. I don’t have anything against teens. I was one once.