[kwlug-disc] 64bit upgrade bugs

[Paul Gallaway]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Insurance Squared Inc.
<gcooke at insurancesquared.com> wrote:
> I've just upgraded my desktop both hardware wise and to a 64 bit version of
> mandriva, having some bumps.  Wondering if anyone has thoughts on debugging
> the following:
> 1) "cat /proc/meminfo" shows 3.5gigs of ram.  Shouldn't it be showing 4
> gigs, particularly now that I'm on a 64 bit OS?

I'm guessing you're using onboard video. You could safely reduce it to
256MB but 512MB is probably fine unless you really need the extra ram.

> 2) Every time I open firefox or thunderbird I get an error "Failed to
> contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to
> enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, ".  Can't seem to diagnose this, google
> isn't helping.
Did you install through your packaging manager? Not sure.

> 3) No sound, and I'm pretty sure it's to do with the motherboard.  How do I
>  start diagnosing sound issues?
'aplay -L' will tell you if you have any devices installed/detected.
Use alsamixer to see if it's been muted which seems to be a common
scenario with certain versions of alsa. If it's still problematic see
if pulseaudio is installed and then troubleshoot that.

> 4) my printer shows up as a scanner.  what?  I don't know what to make of
> that.
Might have a module that the kernel is mistakenly loading or is it be
a multifunction machine scanner/printer? If you can figure out what
scanner module is loading and you're sure you don't want it, blacklist
it (usually /etc/modules or /etc/modules.conf or similar) and try to
configure cups again. I know with my printer I need to install
additional driver packages for it.