Imlib problems with mandriva 2010?

I'm trying to debug a windowmaker style dockapp under mandriva 2010 - it's called E Notes for putting post-it (am I allowed to use that phrase?) style reminders around the screen. It needed some fixes to get it to build and then I decided I needed to get my head around imlib (which that dockapp uses) to know what I should be looking for to solve a particular problem - the dock app was giving me windows with a black foreground and a black background so it's hard to tell what's going on :-)

So to get a better knowledge of imlib I googled and tried downloading the program I found here:
Imlib programmers guide
The first one - written for Xlib - is meant to produce a window displaying a specified image until the window is closed - I compiled (no warnings even with -Wall) ran it and I get _nothing_ no output at the command line, no window opens, sits there doing nothing until I Control-C it.

Puzzled, I then tried moving it onto a ubuntu system and once I'd built it there (that's another story, imlib1 is carefully hidden in the karmic release) it runs fine absolutely no problem, image displayed ok

So my feeling is that - at least on this system - imlib1 is broken under mandriva 2010, I have installed (at least including all imlib ish rpms)
imlib-1.9.15-8mdv2010.0
libimlib1-1.9.15-8mdv2010.0
libgdkimlib1-1.9.15-8mdv2010.0
kdepimlibs4-core-4.3.2-1mdv2010.0
libimlib2-devel-1.4.2-2mdv2010.0
libimlib2_1-filters-1.4.2-2mdv2010.0
libimlib2_1-loaders-1.4.2-2mdv2010.0
libimlib-devel-1.9.15-8mdv2010.0
libimlib2_1-1.4.2-2mdv2010.0

I'm using the imlib-1 here, anyone else seen this or has the installed
libs able to try that small app? Maybe I should try building imlib from scratch?

Once it's running I can make the buildable version available on the web and then I can start adding various extra features I have in mind..!

Upgrading to mandriva 2010

I spent a bit of time this weekend upgrading two machines from Mandriva 2009.1 to 2010. Just a few comments and pointers which might be helpful to others.
I started with a machine which is a little lacking in memory (just 256meg), I initially tried an upgrade from DVD but that crashed before getting to the 'do you want to upgrade' question, I assume this was because of the lack of memory. As I wasn't certain whether it was a DVD problem, I mounted the original downloaded ISO image and put the 4gig of rpm files into /var/cache/urpmi/rpms just to avoid having to download them all again. I then attempted to follow the procedure outlined here though I used the command
urpmi --wget --no-verify-rpm --auto-select -v --allow-force that page is a little confusing as to which options to use. This stopped after only upgrading a few packages and I found I had to do a urpmi kernel and then a repeat of the first urpmi --wget --no-verify-rpm --auto-select -v --allow-force to get the upgrade to really start. It went pretty smoothly considering the low power of the machine, I just had to confirm that certain packages really should be upgraded (maybe I should have used the --force option but it's good to know what is being forced!). Upgrade finished, that machine runs kde4 if a little slowly. With fluxbox as a window manager it is very responsive!
Then onto the mailserver (and my main home machine), the upgrade DVD booted without problems and I just set the upgrade going, went to bed, found it had finished next morning and completed the upgrade with a reboot - very, very straightforward. The only two issues so far have been:

• the loss of the nvidia driver - post upgrade it was using the nv driver which is a little slow for 3D/crack-attack/googleearth, I'd forgotten how to re-install this - go to 'configure your computer' view the hardware, select graphic card and 'configure' and the appropriate (non-open) driver will be downloaded and installed.
• The other problem has been with sound and amarok, I also like to use fluxbox on this machine, but sound wouldn't work until I logged in with KDE4 as the environment, amarok now works in fluxbox but the sound is choppy (which it isn't with the KDE4 environment. I've turned off pulseaudio but presumably there's something within the kde environment which I need to start manually in fluxbox, but, so far, I've not found it!

Here's the inevitable screen shot of the desktop

Oh, and another thing, mandriva doesn't appear to have an rpm for MyPasswordSafe which I've used for quite a few years to keep all my passwords including the one for kwallet (kde's password system which some applications insist on using), I have a copy of MyPasswordSafe in /usr/local/bin which runs fine in fluxbox but falls over with kde4 which is a bit of a problem!! The code off the app website won't build on this system claiming that ui file is too old (pre KDE 3.3) - but the latest version of Ubuntu has a working MyPasswordSafe in its repository, maybe I need to find Ubuntu's source for this?
Oops, forgot to add the summary that 2010 is, in my experience, far more responsive than 2009.1 everything just feels faster (and that's even if I'm running with KDE!)

Upgrading Mandriva to 2009.1

(Beware, this is fairly hardcore geekery, but do read the link to the Mandriva release!)
Since my last upgrade a newer version of Mandriva has been released - last week - and this time I decided to be less conservative and do an early upgrade - I normally wait at least a month for the bugs to be ironed out!
Again I tried it on another machine before upgrading the email server - so I found out that it would be good to remove kdelibs-common

urpme kdelibs-common

which gets rid of any remaining traces of kde3, before starting the upgrade - where I largely followed this procedure adding a --noclean to the urpmi command to prevent deletion of the downloaded files so that I could use them to upgrade machine two. Note, those are the instructions for a 2008 to 2009 upgrade, but the procedure is the same.
Once complete I had two issues, googling solved them, but let me quote them here, with links to the helpful pages:

• Initially the X server would not start and I had to reboot into safe mode as I couldn't switch to a dumb virtual terminal. I disabled the nvidia driver and ignored that for the moment
• Once I got to the login screen I found that neither the mouse nor the keyboard worked! Fortunately I had another machine to websearch and found this, so these two commands and a reboot (not really necessary but just to check:

  chkconfig --del messagebus
  chkconfig --add messagebus

  gets the messagebus running at the correct point in the boot process.
• I then tried getting the nvidia graphics card working - with the default driver various fancy graphics apps fail to run. I'd been getting the following:

  
  (II) NVIDIA(0): Initialized GART.
  
  Backtrace:
  0: /etc/X11/X(xorg_backtrace+0x37) [0x8135f97]
  1: /etc/X11/X(xf86SigHandler+0x56) [0x80cca26]
  2: [0xffffe400]
  3: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so [0xb7074c48]
  
  Fatal server error:
  Caught signal 11. Server aborting

  
  Again I found a bug report here. Adding 'nopat' to the options in /boot/grub/menu.lst also solved the problem for me

Upgrading Mandriva

Over the past three days I'm upgraded two machines to Mandriva 2009. I did this using the urpmi command line method.
The first machine was running Mandriva 2007.1 so I expected this might be a bit complicated, but it went a lot more smoothly than I thought. I needed to invoke the commend a couple of times once I'd worked around various problems - usually by manually removing problematic packages which I didn't really use (mostly -devel ones). I made sure to add --noclean to the command so that the upgrade packages weren't removed and a few hours later - with little supervision - I was booting 2009.1
The other machine had Mandriva 2008.1 - I wanted to test out the 2007.1 installation first as the second machine is the mail/sshd/web server and so I thought this would be a lot smoother. I initially copied all the rpm's from the first machine (left because of --noclean) into /var/cache/urpmi/rpms to the second so that a lot of extra downloading was avoided.
Unfortunately I encountered a number of issues:

• The KDE3 files (the upgrade initially takes you to a kde3 installation) were put in /opt and my /opt just wasn't big enough - post installation all but 33M of the 0.5 gig partition is used mostly by /opt/kde3 - make sure it's big enough for you or make /opt/kde3 a soft link to somewhere larger!
• Then on reboot, I got errors about the file system not being recognised(!), /etc/fstab looks rather different and is a bit intimidating if you've just been dumped out of the boot process and the partitions it's complaining about fail to fsck (file system check). Eventually I commented out the lines and rebooted. Tried various options to get the partition to mount - then with a bit of help from alt.os.linux.mandriva I got the pointer that 2009 uses the libata kernel module which only allows 15 partitions, I have 20 partitions (some of which were for other Linux distros. I then rebooted with a live Knoppix cd, created a /dev/sda3 primary partition and copied most of the stuff inaccessible to Mandriva over into it. Rebooted and now Mandriva has most of my data again!
  I wonder why diskdrake can't report what the problem is when you try to mount /dev/sda16 rather than claiming it needs formatting(!)
• I initially couldn't get any sound with amarok 2 - I'm running blackbox rather than kde/gnome and to get sound I'm going to have to start pulseaudio in my startup file

But I'm now happily running the upgraded installation!

Upgrading Mandriva

This month I decided to upgrade my work laptop from 2007 to 2007.1 of Mandriva before the 2008 gets released in November! Attempted to upgrade but for some reason the upgraded system still thought it was 2007.0 and when applying updates it attempted to get the updates for that version. So swiftly cutting my losses - needing to get work done! - I went for a fresh install.
Overall I'm pretty happy -

• the version of the kernel that came with 2007 had a bug that meant the machine (an HP nx6325) tended to overheat - so I fixed the BIOS that that the fan was running when a mains supply was attached, this bug has now been eliminated and the temperature stays around 55 rather than zooming up to 75 when running a hefty compile!
  
• The fresh version displayed a bug with the graphics with a large corrupt cursor on my second monitor installing the ati drivers.
  
• Our application which gets the machine id sometimes was getting 0 in 2007 for licensing, so far hasn't misbehaved - previously I was having to relicence the application every few days.

My only bugbear is the wireless networking - I eventually got this working a few days ago - I use it at home but not at work - however it keeps locking the machine up! As I wrote on alt.os.linux.mandriva:

I was using 2007 with which ndiswrapper worked well for my home wireless connection on a HP nx6325 however with 2007.1

I initially tried using the builtin driver, couldn't get that to work - getting messages something like 'unable to find bcm43xx driver' so I went back to using ndiswrapper, the instance with 2007.1 didn't seem to work so - after a bit of googling and seeing comments on the
ndiswrapper with 2007.1 - I've installed 1.47 from the tar download (getting rid of the rpm first).
If I'm very careful this - the wireless connection - works for me (having blacklisted bcm43xx) however it appears that if anything is attempting to use a network connection when the wireless is in - I think - an unconnected or initialising state the machine locks up and
the only way out is the power button :-(

Typically I'll see this by doing
modprobe ndiswrapper
... for the moment I've commented out the reference to ndiswrapper in
modprobe.conf ... and the system immediately locks.

I'm using 2.6.17-15mdv and have installed bcmwl5 for ndiswrapper to use.

Anyone seen these symptoms and have a solution?