On Tue, 08 Apr 2014 21:43:57 +0100 steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 08/04/14 19:05, Chris Walker wrote:
On Tue, 8 Apr 2014 17:36:10 +0100 Chris Walker alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk wrote:
A notification has just overwritten the screen saying that the Live DVD of Mageia 4 has just finished. I'll let you know how I get on!
I ran the Live DVD and that works fine! It displays at full screen resolution with all the normal taskbar icons.
I ran one or two checks on the Live DVD. For example, I looked at what kernel stuff was installed and also graphics. It had lots of NVidia stuff in there so for me, it's not something I can easily transfer over. I also ran the same graphics test I do here and although it got further than this (faulty) one does, it didn't get to a full screen display (the bit where it says 'do you want to accept this'.
To answer Mick's question here, I was looking at the list of installed software from Mageia Control Center.
So what can I learn from that? How do I fix the mis-configuration on the machine using the Live DVD or do I bite the bullet and re-install Mageia 4 (I have to admit, that does sound the normal way to fix Windows problems!)?
Off the top of my head:
On your existing faulty system. Create a new user. reboot and log in as this user in the normal desktop environment. If the display works OK, then this means there's something wrong with your user's configuration files (Situation 1).
I created a new user, logged out and into that user but it's the same as what I get here.
If on the other hand the display still doesn't work, then it's more fundamental and it may be a system configuration file like the x11 config file. (Situation 2)
Mick has suggested deleting that, and indeed how I find it. So I'll reboot with the Live DVD in place, check what's configured and what isn't.
The log says that it's using /etc/X11/xorg.conf
So far, I've done this :- mkdir -p $HOME/plasma-config/ mv $(kde4-config --localprefix)/share/config/plasma-desktop* $HOME/plasma-config/ plasma-desktop &
That gave me a better desktop display but the icons at the bottom of the screen are missing in the test account. It was trying to find a reason for that problem that lead me to the above solution. It didn't fix all the problems but it went some way to fixing some. But after a reboot, the reduced size desktop came back.
If I switch off the automatic start of the X server and log in as root, and then startx, I get a full size desktop but still with the white cross on a red background on some of the icons on the taskbar.
I rebooted into the the live distro again and copied the xorg.conf from there to a USB stick. I then overwrote the running version with that and tried again but with the same result, reduced size desktop.
In the Mageia forums, it suggests putting xdriver=radeon in the grub boot file. I did that but it doesn't seem to make a difference.
Mick also suggested that I run Xorg -configure. That fails with "Number of created screens does not match number of detected devices".
I haven't investigated this yet but it's approaching the time when I stuff a DVD in and re-install the OS. I have a full backup which I write yesterday using rsync (I made a note of the commands to use when I asked the question here several months ago) and which I can look at successfully. I'm prepared to give it a few more goes to fix it as I'd like to know what went wrong, in case it happens again but I suspect I will have it working one way or another by the weekend.
Thanks to both of you for sticking with it this far.