[SOLVED] SiS chips support in Mageia 2 ?

[marcuskoze]

Hello,

I've been reading an article (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTgzMg) which says that SiS chips drivers (among others) are going to be discarded from the Linux kernel. This would be a killer for my development machine (an Asus X58C laptop), it is loaded "from head to toes" with SiS chips so it would make my machine a piece of... furniture !? The laptop has zero 3D acceleration support (from what I know) and video playback crashes X before it begins, but the 1.2 GHz Celeron processor handles the Gnome2 environment very well so I can do my work comfortably.

Can someone please tell me whether Mageia 2 will still include the support for SiS chips that Mageia 1 currently has? If not by default, even an optional package install would be wonderful.
As a disclaimer, I haven't yet tried the Mga2 alphas, nor can I find time for it, but I'll surely give it a test in the beta stage from a LiveCD.

[martinw]

The article you link to is talking about the X.Org Mesa drivers, not the Linux kernel. I'm fairly sure the Mesa drivers are only used for 3D support, and as you say that's not working on your laptop even now (which is basically the reason the article gives for these old drivers being dropped - they are unmaintained and buggy), you are unlikely to miss their passing. Does your laptop still work if you select the generic "vesa" driver when configuring your display? If so, you have nothing to worry about (and you might even find that more things work than do with the SiS driver).

[marcuskoze]

Hello martinw, thanks for the reply and sorry about the confusion about linux kernel vs X.Org Mesa stack, I'm not quite able to talk about these in knowledge.

Anyway, I went to the Mageia Control Center / Hardware / Set up the graphical server and chose the vesa option under the Xorg category, confirmed it and ran the Test option... Luckily the script automatically reverted the settings, as nothing works: no synaptic touchpad response, no keyboard response, there is some light-blue-ish background but looks horrible, like a high resolution gradient saved as a poor gif (color transitions happen through horisontal stripes of about 15~20 pixel in height)... Is that the right way of testing the vesa driver you mentioned? If it is, than my laptop is going to stick with Mageia 1 until it dies (I hope that won't happen too soon, as I have no suitable financial power for a new one).

EDIT: strange, I've run a Test in the hardware settings with the current (default, working) settings and the same issues as described above occurs! Anyone experience similar problems?

[martinw]

I think the test option is quite likely to fail if you try to change drivers in MCC - MCC is using X, which is using the old driver. I've just tried it here, and XFdrake (the MCC sub-program that configures the graphical server) crashed. The way to test would be to start in failsafe mode (i.e. boot to the command line), log in as root, and run XFdrake from the command line (the command line interface for XFdrake takes a bit of getting used to, but it does work).

On the other hand, they are only talking about removing the drivers now, so there's a good chance this won't have happened until after the version freeze for Mageia-2.

[doktor5000]

You might want to take a look which driver is really used for your GPU, just post the output of:

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grep -i driver /var/log/Xorg.0.log

[marcuskoze]

@martinw: I see, I'll take a look at xfdrake manual and try it

@doktor5000: here's the output for the suggested command:

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[marcel@localhost ~]$ grep -i driver /var/log/Xorg.0.log
[  3233.988]    X.Org Video Driver: 10.0
[  3233.988]    X.Org XInput driver : 12.2
[  3233.991] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/v4l_drv.so
[  3233.991]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 10.0
[  3233.998] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/sisimedia_drv.so
[  3233.998]    Module class: X.Org Video Driver
[  3233.999]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 10.0
[  3233.999] (II) v4l driver for Video4Linux
[  3233.999] (II) SIS: driver for SiS chipsets: SIS5597/5598, SIS530/620,
[  3233.999] (II) SIS: driver for XGI chipsets: Volari Z7 (XG20),
[  3234.029] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/sisimedia_drv.so
[  3234.029] (II) SIS(0): SiS driver (2006/10/17-1, compiled for X.org 1.10.0.0)
[  3236.782]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 10.0
[  3236.783]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 10.0
[  3236.784]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 10.0
[  3238.398]    Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
[  3238.399]    ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 12.2
[  3238.399] (II) Using input driver 'evdev' for 'Power Button'
[  3238.480] (II) Using input driver 'evdev' for 'Video Bus'
[  3238.482] (II) Using input driver 'evdev' for 'Power Button'
[  3238.483] (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring)
[  3238.484] (II) Using input driver 'evdev' for 'Sleep Button'
[  3238.496] (II) Using input driver 'evdev' for 'Asus Laptop extra buttons'
[  3238.497] (II) Using input driver 'evdev' for 'AT Translated Set 2 keyboard'
[  3238.501]    Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
[  3238.501]    ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 12.2
[  3238.501] (II) Using input driver 'synaptics' for 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad'
[  3238.502] (II) Using input driver 'synaptics' for 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad'


[martinw]

@marcuskoze

Just type XFdrake at the command line (note the first two letters only are upper case), and it will bring up a text based UI that's very similar to the GUI in MCC. Use the cursor keys to move around and the enter key to select things, instead of the mouse.

[doktor5000]

Just type XFdrake at the command line (note the first two letters only are upper case.

FWIW, it can be also called as drakx11 which is not so prone to case-sensitivity

[marcuskoze]

I've managed to change to Xorg|vesa driver(s) but had very weak-to-unusable results (1280x768 instead of the native 1280x800 resolution) + the System/Preferences/Monitors tool says it has a 0Hz refresh rate (indeed, the refresh was visible with the naked eye, the mouse cursor would disappear on clicking, my eyes literally hurt within a few seconds of watching the screen...) So aparently vesa is no viable option for my machine, I'll stick to Mageia 1 on it, if 2 won't like it
Thank you very much for your time and assistance, at least it was educative

Later edit: actually, do you think i'll be able to upgrade the kernel to whatever version Mageia 2 will ship and still retain the Gnome2 desktop?

[doktor5000]

Nope, current Cauldron has no more Gnome2, only Gnome3 with the fallback mode, as Gnome2 is not supported upstream anymore.
There have been discussions and proposals about MATE or Cinnamon (forum search function will tell you) but so far noone stepped up to do the packaging work.

But you could upgrade to Mageia 2, and maybe use LXDE or XFCE, but you still keep the kernel of Mageia 1. But that won't help with the Xorg drivers, as those come with the X server, not with the kernel.

[marcuskoze]

I see... I've tried gnome3 some time ago, before discovering mageia (it was on fedora i think) on this laptop and aside the non-optimal screen resolution (it was poorer than the vesa result i got today) i found that the fallback mode was rather inaccessible on my machine (the thing would require you start the default, 3D-enhanced version) and from there click-click through some (rather hidden at that time) settings to enable the fallback mode... but since my laptop has no 3D support, all i could see from the gnome3 was some white rectangle on top of another (where there should've been the Activites button/hotspot or whatever) so you can imagine I had no way of enabling it... + that the new directions left a bitter taste on me, they've killed such a usable and ergonomic desktop like gnome2 to go to that excessively padded stuff they got now...

[doktor5000]

Sorry, i don't use GNOME so i don't have any opinion on this. To enable fallback mode from login manager,
if i remember correctly there was some trick, a keyboard shortcut like pressing Alt and clicking somewhere
(yes, really intuitive) or something like that.
Otherwise you may want to look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GN ... lback_mode

[marcuskoze]

Well, they say that the fallback mode would automatically kick-in when there's no graphic acceleration, that didn't happen to me when I last tried it. The gsettings cli command could prove useful though:

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gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session session-name 'gnome-fallback'


I'll have to just wait for the release and hope for the best, but just in case I'll store my Mageia 1 iso with Gnome2 in a fluffy location for darker future.

I guess this thread could be marked as solved or cleared, thank you all.