Enlightenment instability in Topaz

Hi,

I am looking for some help trying to figure out how to find the root cause for my Enlightenment instability in Topaz.

I have a Vaio VGN-Z570N which is relatively new.
I installed on it eLive 1.9.49, and subsequently 1.9.56 unstable versions, and it ran for quite a while without any issues.

This week I decided to get Topaz installed. I downloaded it, and did a clean install on the Vaio. I removed the old partitions, recreated new ones and did the clean installation.
As part of my "personalization" process, I have added a few new applications to the IBar at the center, modified some icons, and played with a couple of other shelve settings. My issue with Enlightenment in Topaz that was never observed on the unstable versions are the following:

1. Enlightenment will just freeze. I can move the mouse around, but right or left click does not work. Moving the mouse over the icons in IBar won't affect them. Any key combination on the keyboard also does not work. I end up having to hold the power button to restart the laptop. Normally I would have been able to go to another non-X window and issue a reboot, but the keyboard won't reply to my commands.

2. Shelf number 6 on the top right hand corner with the pager (1 row, 4 workspaces), sometimes loses its settings, more specifically the setting for: Allow windows to overlap the shelf.
This causes the application windows to fail to fully expand the monitor.
The same happens with shelf number 10 on the top left hand corner that holds IBox. I have only noticed this being an issue with both of these top shelves. I have observed it 3 times in the last couple of days.

I wish there was a good way to figure out what is being issue number 1, as this is the one that is most annoying when I am working on something, and all of a sudden I can't even save my work.

Thanks for any help.

Hello nene , have downloaded the emodule ItaskNG? , The shelf 1 has iTask above, download Itask and load Ibar or remove the shelf 1 and reconfigure the shelf1 again.
I really works well Ibar with Shelf1.

Greetings:
Agust

Linux user # 461797
Elive user since 2006

Thanks Agust for your tip, but there was no issue with the iTaskNG. I had checked it already and had not found anything wrong with that part of the GUI.

In the on-going quest to find what was wrong with my installation, I started to notice a general slowdown of the GUI interface, especially when using Thunar file manager. That is something I had not noticed in previous unstable iterations of eLive. In itself it was telling me something immediately.

The light for the harddisk I/O was not blinking, so I had no idea why it was slow.
I used the basic tool of 'top' to find what if the CPU was busy, or something else entirely.
There were no processes that seemed busy, and Thunar was consuming about 2% of CPU only as the highest process on the list. I checked the wait time on the disk I/O and found that it was stuck between 50 to 70% all the time.

The disk I/O wait time being so high was strange. My work machine on unstable 1.9.56 does not seem to have the same type of issues when simply opening Thunar file manager.
I remembered that at work I created both '/boot' and '/' partitions with ReiserFS filesystem. However on the laptop I created the same partitions with 'Reiser4' filesystem type.

I decided to attach my 32GB USB pen drive which is Fat32 filesystem type. I open Thunar, attempt to access the disk, and the machine is once again slow trying to view the contents. Keep in mind that all I had in this drive was the installer module for eLive, which is 32KB in size maybe. Nothing else.
I kill the Thunar process and plug the USB drive to my unstable eLive work machine, and I found over 100 'fscheck*.rec' files that were added.

I did not go further. I simply put the eLive Topaz CD back in the CD-ROM, re-installed eLive and this time I went with EXT3 filesystem for the '/boot' partition, and ReiserFS filesystem for the '/' partition.

So I have eLive Topaz installed with that setting for about 4 days, and so far I have yet to experience any instability with the Enlightenment GUI, or slow down when accessing disk space with Thunar.

If I find anything else, I'll keep you posted.

- nelson

I too am getting something peculiar; the UI is reliably freezing for up to 10 seconds every 30 seconds when I'm logged on as a regular user! Mind u, when I'm actively typing in a terminal session, the freezing is not evident. It only appears when I'm doing something that involves using the mouse! Could it be the mouse driver causing the issue?

My problem started off right after installation:

[akk ~]$ uname -a
Linux akk-elive 2.6.30.9-elive-686 #1 SMP Fri Oct 9 10:25:06 CEST 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

On my first log in, I was welcomed to Elive by a dialog with the following text:

              Errors in your system are detected

your elive system seems like to be damaged or to contain errors
     please reboot your computer in the 'Reparation' mode
       in order to know the cause and solve the problem

It did not appear that anything was amiss until when I tried to move a window and it froze on me. I then proceeded to reboot into 'Reparation' mode to see whether I could resolve the issue. I expected that the system would run through a ton of diagnostics and tell me what it thought was wrong but I realized that I had to drive it. Suffice it to say that everything checked good!

I then decided to see if the problem persisted in this mode by logging in with my regular account. Interestingly, even in this mode I'm still getting the same freezing issue. I then logged out and logged back in as root and the problem has disappeared. Been using the system now for 3hrs with not a single freeze!

If I need to report a bug, what information would be useful in this instance?


Cheers,
ak.