Xorg still does not work properly on Sony Picturebook

[Mike A. Harris]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I just upgraded my Sony C1VFK laptop from FC2 to FC3t2,
> following a suggestion on the Fedora-list that this might help
> get my problem with xorg solved.
> 
> XFree86 worked perfectly in FC-1, and in all previous Redhat distributions
> on this laptop with 16bpp x 1024 x 480,
> but I've only been able to get xorg to work in 8bpp.
> 
> When X is run with DefaultDepth 16 I get a large black oval on the screen
> which gradually changes to a blank white screen.
> There is no X error listed,
> and I am able to get to a console terminal with Ctrl-Alt-F1.
> 
> Any suggestions or advice gratefully received.
> 
> I have filed an xorg bugzilla,
> but I've seen no evidence it has ever been looked at.
> (I tried also to file one with redhat bugzilla
> but for some reason my application failed (3 times).
> I was told I would get confirmation email but it never arrived.)

If you file a bug report in X.Org bugzilla, which is always very
strongly recommended when having X problems, if you also file the
same bug in Red Hat bugzilla for us to track the issue, please be
sure to paste the X.Org bug URL into the Red Hat bugzilla, so we
can track the issue in the X.Org bugzilla.


 > but I've seen no evidence it has ever been looked at.

If someone encounters a bug in the X.Org software, the they should
always file a bug report in X.Org bugzilla.  This ensures that the
issue is easily visible to the largest number of X developers out
there, which in turn maximizes the chances of an X developer or
someone else investigating, troubleshooting and/or fixing a given
issue.

The number of bugs that get reported is high, and a large number of
them require having the identical hardware that the bug reporter
has, which greatly limits the number of developers who can
theoretically investigate a particular issue.  If a bug does in
fact require physical hardware access to investigate, it probably
wont be investigated until someone who has the hardware has spare
time to investigate it.  Since X developers are mostly volunteers,
this may not happen overnight.

The best thing an end user having a problem can do is to file a bug
report to developers in the best location that will potentially
reach the most number of developers or people who could theoretically
confirm the problem, troubleshoot it and/or fix it.  After that,
all you can really do is wait until hopefully someone out there who
is a volunteer developer, decides to investigate the issue and
hopefully fix it.

We all want the bugs that we report to any upstream project to be
acknowledged and confirmed right away, and then to be investigated
and fixed as soon as possible.  That is the ideal scenario for all
of us using OSS software.  Reality seems to dictate that in order for
this to ever occur for any software project, the number of developers
(volunteer or paid) must increase until bugs can get fixed at the
rate they're reported.  In the case of the X server, this is
complicated by lack of access to hardware and/or hardware
documentation, thus limiting what can be done.


Short summary:  The best you can do, is report a bug to the people
who write the software, and provide as much details and information
to reproduce as possible, attaching any log files, config files,
and other information that might be useful.  If you can provide
other debugging information, such as stack traces, or other bits
that may also speed up response times.  Then, all one can do is
sit back and wait.  It might be a day/week/month or it might never
get looked at.  There are no guarantees unfortunately.


will also need to have hardware vendors ship them hardwa