My gnome 2.24 problems in Arch and workarounds

Alright, three problems so far.

1) console-kit-daemon spawns about 60 threads
workaround: pacman -Rd consolekit (will hurt user switching with gdm I think)

2) gnome likes to take over cpu frequency scaling! Tut tut
solution: use /etc/rc.local to define whatever governor you want to use

3) gnome shutdown dialog doesn't work at all
solution: ???

Anyone else having trouble?

 

2.24 is officially released?

EDIT: Ooo.. Nice. I'll download it now.

 

use gconf-editor to edit the gnome-power-manager strings. There you can set cpufreq governors, or tell it to display the option in the UI. Unfortunately the UI neglects the 'conservative' governor, but it can be set in gconf-editor. You can use 'performance' in rc.local, and this will cause things to load more quickly until gnome-power-manager loads. I like that, it's a handy little trick. It's also the reason why your application of a governor in rc.local probably isn't working if you're starting the power manager in your sessions manager.

As for the shutdown dialog not working, are you starting hal in rc.conf? Hal will automatically start dbus, so you don't need to add that. Just make sure you don't have hal backgrounded or you might end up with a cart before the horse issue. Also make sure your user is in the 'power' group. This will effect hal shutdown only, so you'll still need to explicitly allow the 'shutdown' and 'reboot' commands, if you want, probably with sudo is the best option.

Sorry, I know nothing about console-kit.

 

How can you tell it to display the options in the ui for cpufreq?

I followed your instructions about hal (worked fine in gnome 2.22 the way I had it set up) and it didn't work

specifically, the window for the shutdown dialog shows up but it is missing both hibernate and suspend, and telling it to restart or shutdown does nothing.

EDIT: Yeah, things are really screwed up around here, in the power management ui for when laptop lid is closed, there are only options for do nothing and blank screen... so something is up.

 

Ohhh... yeah, 2.24 (sorry, I missed that) appears to have removed cpufreq functionality from the power manager. I didn't realize that Gnome was still messing with it, though. I'll look more into that here in a bit.

Try this to get your buttons back, in gconf-editor

apps > gnome-power-manager > general

You should have 'can hibernate' and 'can suspend' check boxes, I'm guessing they're unchecked.

Oh, if you upgraded from a previous Gnome... try reinstalling the group, there may be some new packages that didn't get pulled properly.

 

That seems to have worked, thanks.

That cpufreq problem I was having? Yeah, gnome's value is set to ondemand and yet it still loads performance.. hell, I even have performance blacklisted in rc.conf... what the heck.

 

To the best of my knowledge, performance is the default and loads automatically. I'm not sure that it can be blacklisted if you're loading your hardware's cpufreq interface. I did some looking and couldn't find any mechanism for Gnome to load a governor in 2.24. I suppose it's possible that you were relying on the Gnome mechanism previously, and when that stopped working, it just loaded the default performance governor?

Also, in case you didn't know, if you load the governor manually by piping it into the /sys interface, you're going to have to do it once for each core.

 

Darn.. I installed 2.24 and it won't let me load Openbox anymore.. :S

 

reinstall openbox?

 

When I try to open nautilus, VLC runs. Oh noes!

 

heh, I haven't had that problem but others have

 

Ok, so I decided to give Gnome 2.24 a go. It looks like most of these problems are stemming from policykit. It looks like to fix it we need to give our user permission in System > Preferences > Authorizations. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble getting this applet privileges, so I'm unable to apply my changes.

Blech.

 

Urgh. That's horrible. Let's hope the gnome team see to it quickly.

By the way, Ethyriel, for your Lenovo, did you do anything more than hwdetect --modules? Did it miss anything which you had to manually install?

 

You know, I don't know why, but it started working for me. I noticed it let me shut down at some point (even though I wasn't given permission with policykit). Next boot, I was able to grant permissions (it prompted for password with gksu, while previously the button was grayed out)

I'm not sure, but I think it might have just required a reboot rather than a logout. I might have rebooted before that, though, so don't quote me on that.

I'm pretty sure hwdetect caught everything that the kernel doesn't autoload, and probably some of that, too. It actually loaded way too much sound stuff and it muddied up my rc.conf. You can just delete everything but snd-hda-intel, and that will load everything else. Same with ath_pci in my case, it added ath_hal and some others which don't need to be loaded explicitly.

I don't know, I'm kind of fed up with Arch right now. It's the only distribution I feel really, truly comfortable in, but things just break way too much. I think I'm going to give Paldo and Frugalware another look, but right now I'm trying my best to be happy with Ubuntu.

 

How do you know which modules don't need to be loaded up? Is there like a probing script you can run?

Ubuntu to me is like a failsafe thing, I know it can boot, I know I can do my typical stuff on it, I know I can shut it down. I know it handles all my hardware without my tweaking. It's 'brain-dead'.

But it just doesn't feel as responsive as Arch. Arch is fast. But Arch somehow makes me feel insecure. Because you install and do all those things yourself, I'm always afraid that I didn't do this module correct or this or that.

 

Typically when I have a new machine I've installed Arch on, I'll boot with an empty rc.conf. That tells me right off what the kernel is autoloading, and I don't need any of that in rc.conf. Then I'll go through what hwdetect wanted to put in hwdetect, and do some trial loads and unloads until I know which will load what dependencies.

It's really not necessary, but I like my module list in rc.conf as lean as possible for ease of administration.

 

Ok, I'll try that for my next boot. So in the installer process, when they ask you if you want to do hwdetect, you just say no? If this is before you install a display manager, what if a module only loads with a graphical interface?

 

Nope, I let it do hwdetect, but comment them all out.

 

Ha! Genius. What's the en mass comment code? Like for java you have

Code:

/*blah
blah*/

and for xml

Code:

< !-- la la la
la la la -- >

EDIT: Whoa. The xml didn't come out. Had to put spaces.

 

Well, when you just want to comment modules individually, you do so with a bang. For example:

MODULES=(ath_pci !ath5k !ipv6 e1000e)

If you want to just temporarily comment them all, it's like any other configuration file:

#MODULES=(ath_pci !ath5k !ipv6 e1000e)

 

Ahh.. I know that.. I was thing more of a block comment. No matter. It'll work just as effective.

 

Just to ask, how do I change the order that programs start up in 2.24? They seemed to remove the order thing. I need my compiz to start before AWN.

 

dunno, never worked for me, just set a 10-15 second delay on awn

Code:

#! /bin/bash
sleep 15;
awnlaunchcommand;

put that in a script and put the absolute path into sessions

 

Yeah... Even back in 2.22 I tried toggling the order number, but they just reset after a reboot.

When you say absolute path, do you mean /home/gary/"script"? or just "script"? And should I put a .sh or .py at the back?

 

the first one. doesn't matter with the prefix.

 

Aye. Thanks.

Oh, I've always had this problem with gnome, but since I'm here I might as say it. I've been having a hard time to get two layouts to co-exist. My default is Dvorak, and I have an alternative qwerty. But the layouts won't switch via keyboard. And after a reboot, both will just become qwerty.

 

Instead of having to use a long sleep like that, you could just write a simple script to start things in order.

 

Amranu's way didn't work.. Do I have to put "exec" or something when running the script from Sessions?

Ethyriel, what's that script you're mentioning?

EDIT: Opps. *nervous laugh* I did work. I had a typo.

 

Sorry, the thread slipped past me

Code:

compiz &
avant-window-navigator

That would almost get you there. The problem is, compiz doesn't detach when it's finished starting, and the & is going to cause awn to load immediately after the compiz command is issued, not after it's finished loading. However, what this allows you to do is time how long it takes compiz to load on your system, and use a more precise sleep command by reducing it to that single variable (essentially).

Code:

compiz &
sleep n;
avant-window-navigator

where 'n' is how long you need to sleep, probably about 4 seconds. This is what I do with pidgin and evolution to get around some problems they have if they start before nm-applet connects.

Alternatively, you could just have an awn script use an if/then test to see if compiz is up, if so run awn, and if not, sleep 2 seconds and try again.

 

Mmm.. I'll try that as well.

Oh, do you have a way to disable the gnome keyring?