Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo

["Kevin O'Gorman" <kogorman@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 5:56 AM, Marc Joliet <marcec@gmx.de> wrote:

> Am Thu, 26 May 2011 16:28:46 -0700
> schrieb "Kevin O'Gorman" <kogorman@gmail.com>:
>
> > It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine.  I feel a
> > little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away.
> >
> > A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could
> no
> > longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in
> via
> > SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs.  I was busy at the time, first
> > deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go.
> >
> > Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up,
> and
> > the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all.  Whatever
> it's
> > trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year,
> and I
> > can't even run the consoles.  The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the
> > motherboard.  Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe
> > support got dropped.
> [...]
>
> (I realise your decision is made, but if this is the bug I think it is,
> this
> has nothing to do with Gentoo in particular.)
>
> I wonder which kernel version you use, because in 2.6.36/37 I was hit by a
> nasty
> EDID parsing bug. Actually, IIRC the code for parsing EDIDs was updated to
> understand more features or something, and that triggered errors that
> didn't
> come up before because those parts of the response from the monitor were
> simply
> ignored until then (or something like that). This lead to my own monitor
> not
> responding for over a minute at a time (sometimes going blank in between)
> and
> other people complained that it left theirs permanently blank.
>
> I think this is the original bug:
>
>  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31943
>
> which contains a workaround (with patch):
>
>  "The drm EDID checker is pretty strict about what EDIDs it will accept.
>  Try
>   this patch and add drm.edid_strict=0 to your kernel command line."
>
> For me, upgrading to 2.6.38 helped, I don't see the problem anymore (though
> other people report otherwise).
>
> *If* this is the bug, it makes me wonder why you don't see it under Ubuntu.
>
> Good luck with Ubuntu!
>
> Thanks.  It's up, its 2.5.38 which may explain a little.  I ported my usual
selections (think "world")
from my laptops, downloaded and installed around 1400 packages in a bit over
5 hours.
This included both libreoffice (the default) and openoffice (from the
selections), apache,
gimp, on and on, and would surely have taken a week or so under Gentoo.

Today, I port over my apache configuration and my embarrassing downtime is
ended.
-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD

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