Fedora 10 on an HP EVO D510

Wed Dec 31 17:03:36 UTC 2008

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Summerfield" <debian at herakles.homelinux.org>
To: "For testers of Fedora Core development releases" <fedora-test-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 9:37:21 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: Fedora 10 on an HP EVO D510

Some of the issues here probably won't be addressed in F10, so this is 
probably a reasonable list for discussion.

Yesterday, I downloaded F10 and installed it on an HP/Compaq EVO D510.

The only non-standard feature on the system is a prism54-based network 
card. It works with the prism54 driver first incorporated into the 
kernel, but needs a firmware blob.

The system has a CD drive, not DVD, and since I wanted to install to the 
system where it will live (needs wireless), I downloaded CD images and 
installed using those burned to CD. I was downloading and installing at 
the same time, downloading running a little faster (thank goodness I 
finally escaped the modem).

Without giving much thought, I chose a text install. On reflection, I 
think that a good choice.

About disk three there was an error reading the zsh rpm. There were 
fewer options than I would like, but "eject" is an improvement on last 
time I had this problem, about RHL 8.0 or a beta of it I think, where I 
could only retry.

I would like also the options to
1. Skip. I understand it's not always prudent to skip a package, but not 
all are equally essential and I'd probably do fairly well without zsh.
2. Install from another source.

In this case, ejecting and reloading the CD was effective.

Since I installed in text mode, F10 defaulted to runlevel 3. This 
highlights the prudence of my choice in doing a text install (besides 
which, text should be faster in 512 Mbytes RAM).

On first boot, I tried to configure the network - I had copied fhe 
firmware into place before rebooting after the install), but the 
text-mode network install doesn't understand wireless.

Note, I've not seen any documentation of how to do this for Fedora, I 
had some experience with the first release of Ubuntu and this particular 
  wireless card, so I had some ideas of what to do. If there is some 
documentation on the 'net, it would be especially hard to browse for it 
as I didn't yet have a working network. For purposes of discussion, 
we're ignoring the other umpteen computers here, okay?

Once I had the driver in the rignt place and a symlink with the right 
name, the wireless came up easily enough.

I was quite surprised though to find it's eth0 in F10 (at least some of 
the time), it used to be eth1 (and is, in the kubuntu 6.10 system I 
booted off my LAN more recently). The EVO has an on-board NIC, so I 
fully expected that to be eth0.

I was dismayed to find I had to apply over 600 Mbytes of updates Those, 
it seemed to me, took longer than the original installation. However, 
it's done.

I then switched to runlevel 5 and tried to login as root.

The screen displayed some junk, but I did get a login screen of sorts. I 
  tried to login, the login failed but there was no comprehensible 
message, the fonts were badly distorted. After that, nothing 
comprehensible displayed and I could not crash X or switch to a text 
console.

The only way to regain control was the power button (no reset switch on 
these systems). Remember, no network yet. I need graphics to configure 
the wireless.

I don't like gdm anyway, never have, so "rpm --erase gdm" and then the 
bits that require it.

After this, the login screen was less useful, so I tried runlevel 3 and 
"startx" as root. That got a grey screen with an X cursor and nothing 
else. I'm pretty sure I had to cycle power again here.

I thought to try tweaking xorg.conf if only to ensure 
control-alt-backspace and control-alt-F1 etc work, but there is none:
(EE) Unable to locate/open config file

The full log is at http://fedora.js.id.au/var/log/Xorg.0.log and its 
content suggests it's going to take more than five minutes to fix. These 
don't look good to me:
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.

Backtrace:
0: /usr/bin/X(xorg_backtrace+0x3b) [0x812bc5b]
1: /usr/bin/X(mieqEnqueue+0x289) [0x810b379]
2: /usr/bin/X(xf86PostMotionEventP+0xc2) [0x80d4262]
3: /usr/bin/X(xf86PostMotionEvent+0x68) [0x80d43c8]
4: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input//evdev_drv.so [0xa6fa8d]
5: /usr/bin/X [0x80bcdb7]
6: /usr/bin/X [0x80ac91e]
7: [0x130400]
8: [0x130416]
9: /lib/libc.so.6(ioctl+0x19) [0x4f3979]
10: /usr/lib/libdrm.so.2 [0x6f56cf]
11: /usr/lib/libdrm.so.2(drmCommandWrite+0x34) [0x6f5984]
12: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//intel_drv.so(I830Sync+0x135) [0x711ca5]
13: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//intel_drv.so [0x73b97a]
14: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so(exaWaitSync+0x65) [0x7d4095]
15: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so(ExaDoPrepareAccess+0x7e) [0x7d53ae]
16: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so [0x7da3b2]
17: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so [0x7da905]
18: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so(exaDoMigration+0x652) [0x7db0c2]
19: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so(exaCopyNtoN+0x3f1) [0x7d7fd1]
20: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so(exaComposite+0x90e) [0x7dd4de]
21: /usr/bin/X [0x816f6fa]
22: /usr/bin/X(CompositePicture+0x19a) [0x815818a]
23: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so [0x7d8c1d]
24: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so(exaGlyphs+0x4e2) [0x7d9672]
25: /usr/bin/X [0x816f9c5]
26: /usr/bin/X(CompositeGlyphs+0xa2) [0x8154612]
27: /usr/bin/X [0x816197e]
28: /usr/bin/X [0x815ad75]
29: /usr/bin/X(Dispatch+0x34f) [0x8085e9f]
30: /usr/bin/X(main+0x47d) [0x806b71d]
31: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe5) [0x42e6e5]
[mi] mieqEnequeue: out-of-order valuator event; dropping.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.

Here is a similar report:
http://www.mail-archive.com/dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg37058.html 
In view of this, I tried booting with 'vga=6' but the result is a login 
screen with a garbage background but visible entry boxes and 
intelligible text. However, mouseclicks and the keyboard are ignored. 
With the earlier kernel, I got no garbage (but that might have been 
luck), but the other symptoms are the same.

I connected over the LAN (It's been relocated). "chvt 1" is ineffective. 
  "telinit 3" has no visible effect. Nothing less than "kill -KILL" got 
rid of X and that left the display in a parlous state: random junk, 
frozen X mouse cursor.

This is similar:
https://fcp.surfsite.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?viewmode=flat&order=ASC&topic_id=61646&forum=12&move=prev&topic_time=1221670292

I have to have this system running, Mrs S requires it. I know this 
system runs opensuse 11.0, but I plan on trying CentOS5 first. It's not 
available for testing.

fwiw I have a Kubuntu 6.10 sytem I can boot off the LAN. It boots fine 
on this system (to a framebuffer console, I don't have X on it), and 
even loads the firmware for the wireless card (which certainly was not 
present in the original system I did the install on).

-- 

Cheers
John

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You may or may not know, the "Evo D510" covers a wide range of hardware. I have 4 "HP/Compaq Evo D510" machines here only 2 of them are close to being the same. All of them are running F10 with out issue.

Robert 'Bob' Jensen 
Fedora Unity Project
http://fedoraunity.org/