For instance, there’s all this talk about the 3D Desktop stuff in Mandriva. Well, I like eye candy so I want to check it out. I don’t have a sloucher of a machine either so I know for sure it’ll be able to take whatever can be thrown at it. It’s an HP Media Centrt PC m7470n which is essentially an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz), 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon Xpress 200, 300GB SATA drive, and all the other media/TV tuner crap that came with it (it was a powerful machine for a really smoking good price). At any rate, it should be able to handle turning my desktop into a funky cube or whatever the 3d desktop is supposed to do.

Well apparently my system is unsupported. So I spent about 2 hours tonight dicking around, installing the ATI dkms stuff, then realizing I needed the ati rpm, then I had installed the ati-kernel rpm which conflicted with the dkms so I removed the ati-kernel rpm and it still wouldn’t work so “dkms status” was telling me nothing so I removed and reinstalled the ati-dkms rpm and in between all of these things I was rebooting just to ensure that stuff would work properly. Well half the time it wasn’t loading the fglrx module in the kernel, then I had to configure with XFdrake, and it wonked my xorg.conf a bit, then things looked better but glxgears was still only giving me 180FPS which I’m pretty sure is bad, and I’m perusing the Mandriva cooker twiki and the output from glxinfo and finally realize that for some bizarre reason direct rendering is not enabled.

So I look in my Xorg.log files and lo and behold I see:

(WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************
(WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed!                  *
(WW) fglrx(0): * (maybe driver kernel module missing or bad) *
(WW) fglrx(0): * 2D acceleraton available (MMIO)             *
(WW) fglrx(0): * no 3D acceleration available                *
(WW) fglrx(0): ********************************************* *
...
(II) fglrx(0): Acceleration enabled
(II) fglrx(0): Direct rendering disabled

Well WTF?!? AAAARGGGHH!

Are you shitting me? I’ve spent two hours getting the damn ATI kernel module installed, lsmod most definitely tells me that fglrx is loaded and I get this? Suffice it say I gave up. But I’m a stubborn guy so I’ll qualify that with a “for now”.

At any rate I’m less than impressed. Well, with this. Mandriva 2007 seems pretty nice so far (well, I installed RC2 and synced up with cooker right after the install). The 3d desktop is of less importance to me than getting vmware server working on it, but it would have been nice to play with since this is one of the premier features. Sadly, I need a lot more hand-holding than I’m getting.

This kind of thing is precisely why, for me, Linux belongs on the server. Now if those kernel-developing idiots would get there act together and give us a 2.6 kernel that was a) stable and b) supported for more than a week, then I’d really be pleased. I don’t think the problem with Linux on the desktop is Linux… Linux, and the associated bits and pieces make a fine desktop. It works really really well. The problem is how the desktop compares with other desktops. If you just need a functional, no eye-candy, all business desktop… look no further than any Linux distro with an X server. If you want something fun and fancy prepare to either obtain that with wall paper and skins/themes or a few hours of cussing out your machine. Frankly, I don’t have the time to waste on something on that should just plain work.

Yes, I’m ranting… =) It pisses me off that I can’t get that cuby thing on my spanky machine in a reasonable amount of time (I’d be more than happy to invest half an hour, but upwards of 2hrs? Come on!).

So wandering over to ATI’s download page found me the latest drivers in a nice installer form. Download the ATI Driver Installer and go to town… it actually works quite well. With it, you can create Mandriva rpms by following the little dialogs that seem to be 100% compatible (I installed the powerpack DVD so it had the old proprietary drivers and using this, the packages were made and I could just “rpm -Fvh” the resulting rpm packages). Yes! X works again.

Had a heck of a time setting up my urpmi sources last night tho… looks like mDNSResponder is being stupid… ftp was complaining about no buffer space being left, but lynx worked (anything using FTP, btw… so that was the ftp client and curl). Disabling mDNSResponder allowed me to get my urpmi sources setup. Strange… I don’t recall seeing this before but this was one of the few times I didn’t really fiddle with the install and disable a bunch of stuff.

The other issue is a long-standing one with 2006/x86_64 community and some broken KDE/QT packages. This has been a problem for months, I’ve reported it on numerous occassions (because I’ve seen it on my x86_64 laptop) and it *still* isn’t fixed.The problem is as follows:

[root@media ~]# urpmi --media community --auto-select
Some package requested cannot be installed:
foomatic-db-3.0.2-1.20060227.0.1.20060mdk.noarch
Continue? (Y/n)
The following packages have to be removed for others to be upgraded:
libarts1-1.4.2-2mdk.i586 (due to missing libqt-mt.so.3)
libkdecore4-3.4.2-31.3.20060mdk.i586 (due to missing libqt-mt.so.3, due to
  unsatisfied libqt3 >= 3.2.2, due to missing libartsflow.so.1, due to missing
  libartsflow_idl.so.1, due to missing libkmedia2_idl.so.1, due to missing libmcop.so.1,
  due to missing libqtmcop.so.1, due to missing libsoundserver_idl.so.1)
libqt3-3.3.4-23mdk.i586 (due to unsatisfied qt3-common == 3.3.4-23mdk)
mindawn-1.3.050824-050916mdk.i586 (due to missing libqt-mt.so.3)
skype-1.2.0.17-1mdk.i586 (due to missing libqt-mt.so.3)
x86-compat-galaxy-kde-1.0.2-19mdk.x86_64 (due to missing libkdefx.so.4) (y/N)

Umm… this sucks and is a major nuisance because it gets in the way of everything else in community from getting upgraded other than urpmi and glibc. Of course, *I* don’t need any of this, but the fellow who’s picking up this computer might (I’m sure he might like to play with skype).

Of course, this is all KDE/QT-related stuff which strengthens my notion that KDE sucks. Oh, and that x86_64 is a second-rate citizen. Has *no one* else seen this? If I elect to remove those packages (hit “y” instead of “n”), I get a whole whack of packages to update.

Note that this is a default 2006/x86_64 powerpack DVD install. I removed a few thinks, like kdegraphics-kprintfax or whatever, stuff like kopete I removed, but for the most part I left things well enough alone and this is the thanks I get. Bad community repository.

Oh well, I guess he doesn’t get to play with skype after all… I can’t leave the machine in a half-baked state so off we go.