Re: serious X problem
On 23 April 2010 18:24, Barry barr...@paradise.net.nz wrote: Jim Cheetham wrote: On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Barry barr...@paradise.net.nz wrote: after many failed attempts to view movies I am at a complete loss on where to search next for a cure to my problem. *any* movie? What codecs are you trying? Perhaps you're trying to play something you don't have any support for, and that's what's doing the actual crashing. avi files from my camera, VOB, wmv. Not sure on how to check for installed video codecs. I seem to remember a package for microsoft codecs,do I need it?? The problem does not occur with an install of Mandriva one live for 2009.0 but this distro has other problems, and an upgrade to 2009.1 gives a messy system. Well ... perhaps don't use Mandriva? If it can't upgrade itself properly, use something that can. Barry, I know you are addicted to that Mandrake derivative, but like its root vegetable namesake, it really is dangerous. I had an unfortunate affair with it some years ago, but fortunately managed to get off it without any permanent damage or consequencies - I was a user for only a few months thank goodness - I'll never touch it again primarily because of the ongoing problems it seems to be giving you. Here's an offer you should not refuse. I'll install Sabayon-5.2 plus all updates to the minute on to your HP lappie over the w/e. It's both solid and aesthetically beautiful. The KDE-4.4 concept of one so called 'activity' per desk is exactly what a fellow needs. All I need from the list is a suggestion for how Barry can be helped over the DTs and other symptoms of Mandrake withdrawal. :-) -jim one box performing excellently, it ain't broke so I don't want to fix it. I would like both boxes on the same system. You will - It's called Linux. -- Sincerely etc. Christopher Sawtell
Re: serious X problem
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 6:24 PM, Barry barr...@paradise.net.nz wrote: avi files from my camera, VOB, wmv. Not sure on how to check for installed video codecs. I seem to remember a package for microsoft codecs,do I need it?? The filename extension normally indicates what container the video has, but doesn't tell you how the video audio inside it are encoded -- it's like seeing a tgz file -- you know that the contents are in a compressed tar format, but you still don't know if it contains jpegs or gifs or bmps ... ffmpeg -i movie will tell you what's inside a file $ ffmpeg -i Big_Buck_Bunny_1080p_surround_FrostWire.com.avi ... Input #0, avi, from 'Big_Buck_Bunny_1080p_surround_FrostWire.com.avi': Duration: 00:09:56.48, start: 0.00, bitrate: 12455 kb/s Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 1920x1080 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 24 tbr, 24 tbn, 24 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s So I can see that this file has video encoded with mpeg4, and an AC3 audion track. However, if you are seeing this with a wide range of input files, this is probably a red herring. Most likely the problem is down to the video driver that X is using. You will need to provide details of what video card you have (lspci) and what driver you are using (lsmod perhaps). That's not my area of specialty, sorry ... either wait for a more video-aware CLUG response, or widen your search to nzlug's mailing list ... -jim
Re: serious X problem
On 23 April 2010 17:08, Barry barr...@paradise.net.nz wrote: after many failed attempts to view movies I am at a complete loss on where to search next for a cure to my problem. Every time I try to view any movie X crashes requiring a restart and sometimes locks the kbd. This happens with mplayer and vlc. It follows a clean install of Mandriva2009.1 The only msg I have is 'Unsupported pixel format' but can not find anything in the logs after restarting ... Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Would this be the issue? https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=58896
Re: serious X problem
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Barry barr...@paradise.net.nz wrote: after many failed attempts to view movies I am at a complete loss on where to search next for a cure to my problem. Every time I try to view any movie X crashes requiring a restart and sometimes locks the kbd. This happens with mplayer and vlc. It follows a clean install of Mandriva2009.1 The only msg I have is 'Unsupported pixel format' but can not find anything in the logs after restarting Checked the output of 'ldd mplayer', 'rpm -q -requires mplayer'. All dependencies appear to be in place. Google produces many replies, none work. Scrapped the original Xorg.conf, allowed X to create a new one, Then tried creating a new one with XFdrake. Have now removed as much as possible of pulseaudio - still can not play movies. The problem does not occur with an install of Mandriva one live for 2009.0 but this distro has other problems, and an upgrade to 2009.1 gives a messy system. The box is a Compac NX9040. The same distro runs fine on my other box which is one I got from Craig / Avonside High, And I think that install is an upgrade. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Barry It is very hard to tell with so little information, and that is probably because of the immediate crash which wipes out your debugging info by crashing X and any xterm you are running from. However IMHO it's likely to be a problem with the X driver. mplayer and most other video players prefer to output via xv which enables some direct interaction with hardware. It is a lot faster than using x11, to the point where many movies will not play smoothly in x11. However it is worth trying: mplayer -vo x11 moviefile.avi to see if it crashes, then the same using -vo xv to see if there is a difference. I see you are ion a notebook with presumably shared RAM between your video system and your OS. Allocate as much ram as possible to video in the bios. By the way if you are having immediate crashes and cannot read the mplayer output, try either starting mplayer from a console, where an X crash won't affect you, or redirect mplayer's output to a file so it survives the X crash. To start from a console, first of all in a terminal within X run xhost + (this is a security risk but unless you have intruders on your lan worry not) then in a console run export DISPLAY=:0 mplayer -vo xv moviefile.avi the movie should play (or crash) in your X screen, but the console will report back all the error messages. The other obvious test is to run another distro from a livecd and see if it will play a movie on your system. You'll probably need to pick a live cd that has access to a good range of codecs (probably chris' sabayon would work well, or pclinuxos perhaps), or pick a movie that has open codecs. I know a lot of first reactions were to put another version of linux on your machine. A few simple tests should isolate the problem before you do anything that radical. I am in two minds about you switching distros. It can be a pain to change and learn new tricks, but frankly I haven't seen much positive about mandrivel in recent times.
Re: serious X problem
On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Nick Rout nick.r...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Barry barr...@paradise.net.nz wrote: after many failed attempts to view movies I am at a complete loss on where to search next for a cure to my problem. Every time I try to view any movie X crashes requiring a restart and sometimes locks the kbd. This happens with mplayer and vlc. It follows a clean install of Mandriva2009.1 The only msg I have is 'Unsupported pixel format' but can not find anything in the logs after restarting Checked the output of 'ldd mplayer', 'rpm -q -requires mplayer'. All dependencies appear to be in place. Google produces many replies, none work. Scrapped the original Xorg.conf, allowed X to create a new one, Then tried creating a new one with XFdrake. Have now removed as much as possible of pulseaudio - still can not play movies. The problem does not occur with an install of Mandriva one live for 2009.0 but this distro has other problems, and an upgrade to 2009.1 gives a messy system. The box is a Compac NX9040. The same distro runs fine on my other box which is one I got from Craig / Avonside High, And I think that install is an upgrade. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Barry It is very hard to tell with so little information, and that is probably because of the immediate crash which wipes out your debugging info by crashing X and any xterm you are running from. However IMHO it's likely to be a problem with the X driver. mplayer and most other video players prefer to output via xv which enables some direct interaction with hardware. It is a lot faster than using x11, to the point where many movies will not play smoothly in x11. However it is worth trying: mplayer -vo x11 moviefile.avi to see if it crashes, then the same using -vo xv to see if there is a difference. I see you are ion a notebook with presumably shared RAM between your video system and your OS. Allocate as much ram as possible to video in the bios. By the way if you are having immediate crashes and cannot read the mplayer output, try either starting mplayer from a console, where an X crash won't affect you, or redirect mplayer's output to a file so it survives the X crash. To start from a console, first of all in a terminal within X run xhost + (this is a security risk but unless you have intruders on your lan worry not) then in a console run export DISPLAY=:0 mplayer -vo xv moviefile.avi the movie should play (or crash) in your X screen, but the console will report back all the error messages. The other obvious test is to run another distro from a livecd and see if it will play a movie on your system. You'll probably need to pick a live cd that has access to a good range of codecs (probably chris' sabayon would work well, or pclinuxos perhaps), or pick a movie that has open codecs. I know a lot of first reactions were to put another version of linux on your machine. A few simple tests should isolate the problem before you do anything that radical. I am in two minds about you switching distros. It can be a pain to change and learn new tricks, but frankly I haven't seen much positive about mandrivel in recent times. Another thing to try is -vo null for mplayer, which will give no video output, but if it still craashes then we are barking up the wrong tree with the X11 stuff. There is also our old friend strace to really look into what is making it crash!
Re: Stopping disk I/O from massively slowing down the desktop - any suggestions?
On Thursday 22 April 2010 08:02:08 Phill Coxon wrote: Hi, I'm currently running KUbuntu 8.04.4. I'll be upgrading to KUbuntu 10.04 LTS in a few days so it's possible that the upgrade will fix this problem but I'll ask anyway. I've been having this ongoing problem with certain tasks doing massive disk I/O that results in the desktop becoming completely unresponsive. Guilty tasks include updatedb, Amarok rebuilding it's collection data and VMWare starting up or shutting down - basically any task that is doing a very large amount of reading from the main drive. When this is happening my desktop can become unusable for 30-90 seconds. Opening a new shell can take 30-45 seconds to appear, applications will pretty much freeze until the disk calms down. Is there any way to place limits so that a particular task can't hog all of the disk I/O at the expense of everything else? The drive is a Western Digital 320Gb 16Mb SATA II, ext3 file system. Thanks! My two cents: I was building a new system for home out of a few bits I had lying around. For this system I purchased a Western Digital SATA hard drive, WDC WD8088AADS. I installed $DISTRO, and I experienced the same problem you are describing. I noticed when running top that the %wa figure would go sky-high when the system was bound up. Googling top %wa led me to a definition for wa which was waiting for I/O Further searching indicated that this problem can occur when using usb flash drives, and that a handling is having a better scheduler in the kernel, or using the latest kernel, 2.6.33, which has a better scheduler. So I compiled three kernels with different scheduler settings, and tried these. This didn't make any difference. Then I upgraded to 2.6.33, and this didn't make any difference. Further experimenting with the system showed that the same O/S, running from an IDE drive, did not have this problem. So I thought perhaps the problem could be with the SATA chipset on the motherboard. I purchased a SATA to PATA bridge, and plugged the SATA drive into an IDE port. I got the same problem. The SATA to PATA bridge is entirely hardware, and the O/S thinks it is talking to a PATA drive. Summary: The Western Digital drive, plugged into a SATA port, has I/O problems. A PATA drive plugged into a PATA port, does not have I/O problems. The Western Digital drive, plugged into a PATA port through a bridge which the O/S can't see and thus uses PATA drivers for, has I/O problems. Conclusion: I think the problem is with the hard drive. Unfortunately I don't have another SATA drive I can use to confirm that a different drive by a different manufacturer, may work ok on the SATA bus. Cheers, Wayne
Re: serious X problem
On Fri 23 Apr 2010 17:08:33 NZST +1200, Barry wrote: Every time I try to view any movie X crashes requiring a restart and sometimes locks the kbd. This happens with mplayer and vlc. It follows a clean install of Mandriva2009.1 The only msg I have is 'Unsupported pixel format' but can not find anything in the logs after restarting As others have pointed out, the root cause of your problem is one of two: 1) Your distro ships broken X drivers or a broken xorg. No application should cause your xorg to crash no matter what pile of dirt data it shoves at it. This is not a recommendation for your xorg version or the xorg driver version for your video hardware. File a bug report with your distro. An X crash is a serious bug, what you've been running is irrelevant except for debugging. It is possible the xorg bug is only triggered by using certain features of it, and it may be that only some (specifically video playing) applications use these broken features. This is assuming our xorg actually crashes - use ps after a crash to check. If only mplayerCo crash, your xorg still runs but may become unusable (which I count as an xorg or general Linux bug too). 2) Your hardware is broken, but the problem mainly only shows when using some xorg features but not others. Perhaps it's even bad RAM, and the bad area is only used when you play videos. Many possibilities exist. It can be rather difficult to distinguish between 1) and 2). Saying the same distro works on another PC doesn't tell you that your xorg has no problems if the PC has different graphics hardware. Nick gave you some good advice for capturing the crash output. Start the program from a text console instead, and/or redirect its output to file. Use strace and ltrace. If your X app causes your xorg to crash, you need to trace xorg. Either way, I expect you're either going to be fixing your hardware or be waiting for your distro vendor to supply fixed software. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
Re: Stopping disk I/O from massively slowing down the desktop - any suggestions?
On Saturday 24 April 2010 13:34:28 Phill Coxon wrote: Hi Wayne, Thanks for your great input - I think you've identified the problem. I'm going to be watching the wa% in top this afternoon. Post your conclusions of what you find, please. I also found this: http://strugglers.net/wiki/Linux_performance_tuning Bookmarked. Good link. It definitely looks like a drive problem for me too. Bugger. Perhaps someone else has a fix for it. Cheers, Wayne
