MX-17 Beta 2 Feedback

[entropyfoe]

With the nvidia driver not building on 4.13, I am wondering what my next step should be.

I have the nvidia card listed in the signature. I have the nvidia working on antix17 and MX17 b1. (375.82-1-deb90)

Is my card new enough that I would get a working nvidia driver built during an upgrade with the MX tool?

Or should I wait to try an MX 17 b2 install until some fix is in place.
I can't run the noveau driver, as X locks the mouse and keyboard every half day or so.

[dolphin_oracle]

With the nvidia driver not building on 4.13, I am wondering what my next step should be.

I have the nvidia card listed in the signature. I have the nvidia working on antix17 and MX17 b1. (375.82-1-deb90)

Is my card new enough that I would get a working nvidia driver built during an upgrade with the MX tool?

Or should I wait to try an MX 17 b2 install until some fix is in place.
I can't run the noveau driver, as X locks the mouse and keyboard every half day or so.

stevo says that driver builds, so give it a try.

[Stevo]

I am backporting the 304 and 340 legacy drivers from upstream Debian, which are advertised to build on the newer kernels, including even 4.14. I'll have them in a couple minutes, thanks to pbuilder...

[entropyfoe]

Thanks Dolphin_Oracle and stevo...

I will try it tonight and report the results.

As a side note...I have never seen in all my Mepis and MX history such a recent kernel as the basis of the distro.
Now, I am excited, because I need newer to support the Ryzen CPU and motherboard chip sets, so no problem for me.

But I wonder, are we in greater danger of instability with such a new kernel? Does this warrant extra testing in the beta and RC stage than say MX-16 did?

For me MX (and Mepis before) have always been known for stability and robustness. This along with this great community are the strong points of MX and antix.
I hope we do not lose the stability.

My antix 17 is very stable on the 4.10 kernel, now approaching 17 days uptime without crash or lock-up in two trials (8 days with rc1, and now 9 days with the final). I am hoping the 4.13 will be even better, though 4.14 will be a LTS kernel, and Phoronix says 4.15 will be the big increase in capability for Ryzen chips, with working temperature monitoring (finally !) and other goodies. The whole Ryzen thing is still in flux, with a new BIOS (1204) just out a week ago , promising "increase system stability". Since antix seems stable, I will hold off on the newer BIOS for now since Asus offers no change log.

[BitJam]

As a side note...I have never seen in all my Mepis and MX history such a recent kernel as the basis of the distro.
Now, I am excited, because I need newer to support the Ryzen CPU and motherboard chip sets, so no problem for me.

But I wonder, are we in greater danger of instability with such a new kernel? Does this warrant extra testing in the beta and RC stage than say MX-16 did?

MX-15 used a 4.2.6 kernel which was released in mid-November. The 4.13 kernel was released in early September. There was a lot of last-minute Christmas-eve-eve coding to get that 4.2.6 kernel to work live. So compared to MX-15 we are being more conservative this time. The reason we pushed that recent kernel into MX-15 was the same reason we are pushing a recent kernel into MX-17: support for recently released hardware.

The biggest problems are the ones you are seeing in this thread: support for older (often close-sourced) drivers. I don't speak for the dev team but IMO it is almost always worthwhile to use a recent kernel if it supports the next generation of hardware that is already in the field. I'm not saying recent kernels are problem-free it's that not supporting recent hardware can be a big black-eye.

[dolphin_oracle]

Also assuing we stick with 4.13, we will offer fallback kernels in mx-pi.

[richb]

It's a balancing act isn't it. Indeed we must support newer machines with the newer kernels but not create problems for older machines which are still in the wild and I would guess are in higher numbers than the brand new ones. I would not want to hear that my five year old laptop or two year old desktop is not going to work anymore with a new MX release. One would say stay with the older version of MX. I do not roll that way.

[dr-kart]

...main 375.82 Nvidia driver has no problem with the 4.13 kernel

Yes. Got no problem with it on 4.13 kernel.
Since backported nvidia driver appears to me bit newer I choose the one with 375.82-8~bpo9+1 name. Not from main repo. And what's the difference between those main's and bpo's versions?

Code: Select all

Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA GK106 [GeForce GTX 650 Ti] bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:11c6
           Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.19.2 ) driver: nvidia Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
           OpenGL: renderer: GeForce GTX 650 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
           version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 375.82 Direct Render: Yes

[huffy]

The sound worked perfect with MX16 but doesn't work on MX17beta2 64 bit. Dell Latitude E5400. This is an issue with several new distros I've tried so not your problem exclusively. I tried the fallback 4.10 kernel and same. This beta works very well otherwise. I guess my puter is growing old. Thanks for a great system, I'll just keep using 16.

[dolphin_oracle]

The sound worked perfect with MX16 but doesn't work on MX17beta2 64 bit. Dell Latitude E5400. This is an issue with several new distros I've tried so not your problem exclusively. I tried the fallback 4.10 kernel and same. This beta works very well otherwise. I guess my puter is growing old. Thanks for a great system, I'll just keep using 16.

could you post "inxi -F" for this hardware? I'm surprised you have no sound.

Perhaps check alsamxier (now in Xfce Settings Manager) and see if the channels are muted or if its defaulting to an hdmi or some other port.