On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:12:49 -0700 drew wymore <[email protected]> dijo:
> Since the kernel downgrade seems to have helped I am wondering if it > has something to do with the kernel handles the graphics subsystem. > I've been reading some bits over the past few months about GEM or some > such that was causing some X bugginess. Last night I finally succeeded in convicting the felon responsible for the mayhem: pango-graphite. Pango-graphite is a utility from the Summer Institute of Linguistics that is available in Ubuntu repositories. Its function is to enable "smart" fonts to stack combining diacriticals, among other features useful to linguists. For example, suppose you needed to write a nasal tilde mark over a vowel, and also an accent mark at the same time. Unfortunately, it needs more testing. Following its conviction I sent it to the Synaptic jail until it can be demonstrated that it has reformed its behavior. The trial consisted of removing a lot of unused applications in a general housekeeping binge - freed up almost a GB of space. Not only did I remove a lot of programs that I never use, I also uninstalled a lot of fonts, and also removed anything to do with fonts unless it was clearly necessary. One of the removals was pango-graphite. After the cleanup I rebooted, but the problem was still not completely resolved. The -13 kernel did make things better, but the desktop font was still a bit strange and the mouse still did not work. So I booted to a Jaunty x86_64 live CD. My intention was to make sure the mouse worked with the live CD (it did), and then go into Synaptic and write down every bluetooth utility and library. Then I planned to reboot to my normal installation, go into Synaptic and remove/install so I would have exactly the same packages as the live CD. While in the live CD I also wrote down everything that turned up with a search on 'xorg,' intending to do the same remove/install back in my normal installation. Then I rebooted to the -15 kernel. When Ubuntu came up the mouse was working and the desktop font was normal again. I did not have to remove/install anything in Synaptic - it "just worked." I have no explanation for why it was necessary to make a trip through the live CD before things started working again. I have not bothered with the list of xorg packages, since the problem appears resolved. This morning I did have an unnerving experience, indicating that things may still not be perfect. I opened a bookmark in a new tab in Firefox and was suddenly staring at a black screen with a bunch of incomprehensible messages on it - memory addresses, mostly. However, I ran memtest for 12 hours the other day and there were no errors, so I doubt it was a physical problem with the RAM. The only clue I could see was a reference to "kinit." I had installed kubuntu-desktop previously, so I decided to uninstall it just in case it was the cause of this latest problem. I couldn't recover from the black screen, so I turned off the computer and restarted it. The pango-graphite problem never gave me a black screen, so this is new. If it wasn't the kubuntu-desktop, then perhaps it was something else I uninstalled. There are no messages in /var/log/messages. Ubuntu is back up again, the mouse and desktop font are normal, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Meantime, if anyone knows what kinit does, it might be useful to know. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
