[kde-linux] Non-functinal kde displays with 11.4

[Felix Miata]

On 2011/11/19 20:50 (GMT-0500) FrankK composed:

> Basic:
> lspci | grep VGA
> Detailed:
> hwinfo --gfxcard
> /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Quoting a .sig from an email can result in the part of your messages that 
follows the quote to disappear from an attempt to respond. That's what 
happened here. Never quote a .sig. It's never relevant to a response.

Anyway the fact that you have this problem using older hardware only in KDE 
but not LXDE suggests that your old hardware was not among the hardware 
tested as drivers and KDE have continued to evolve. Likely your hardware 
requires compositing disabled, but KDE defaults to enabling it. Had the 
drivers for your hardware been tested during 11.4 development, probably 
compositing would have been disabled by openSUSE's Xorg devs or Xorg's devs 
at the driver level.

It's possible saving

	Section "Extensions"
	        Option          "Composite" "Disable"
	EndSection

as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-composite.conf would be all you need. It may be 
that you would need to paste it into your xorg.conf file(s) instead. This 
constitutes global disabling of compositing, which means it'll be disable 
regardless which DTE you run. There will be a KDE specific way to disable it 
on a user by user basis without requiring KDE to function first to turn it 
off via systemsettings, but I have no idea where that is.

More specific help really isn't possible without knowing which hardware you 
have, particularly the Intel and NVidia. Vanta is really old, and probably 
got little or no testing. It probably is incompatible with the nouveau driver 
reported to be in use by the Xorg.0.log snippet you included. Try following 
the instructions to disable nouveau in one of the included URLs for that 
machine. For the other machines, go through all of them and try again.

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Configuring_graphics_cards
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Radeon
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Nouveau
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:ATI_troubleshooting

Also, any of *113* or *114* in http://fm.no-ip.com/Tmp/Linux/Xorg/ or 
http://fm.no-ip.com/Tmp/SUSE/ may include a matching xorg.conf in its head 
that may serve as a template to manually altering older xorg.conf files to 
work in 11.4. Most of what older releases' xorg.conf files included should 
not be needed in releases newer than 11.2 (the last version that included 
SaX2 for creating them). Note that xorg.conf should not be needed, but for 
older hardware it's common for at least parts of their content to be needed 
to work around untest incompatibilities in old hardware. It's often simpler 
to narrow down what's needed by using the (smaller) individual files in 
xorg.conf.d/ instead of xorg.conf.

FWIW, I have 11.4/KDE working on a lot of old hardware, but IIRC Vanta is not 
in any of them I ever use.

If you can't get this figured out on your own, or find out how to disable 
compositing only in KDE via text editor from someone here, you may be better 
off looking for a solution in http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-xorg or 
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse or subscribing to those lists and asking 
there.
-- 
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

   Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/