On 13/11/2011, at 8:07 PM, Bob Tracy wrote:
Here's the observed current state of the major graphical environments on Alpha: (1) Gnome-3"gdm3" works. After login, screen is black except for mouse pointer. Logging in remotely and looking at the various running processes, itappears that everything is working more-or-less the way it'ssupposed to except for nothing showing up on the console. Note: KMSis required, else, you get the gnome-fallback session (gnome-2).
Note that the Debian kernel does not yet provide KMS for Alpha. One has to compile the 3.1 kernel themselves to get working KMS on Alpha, and that is KMS for Radeon cards only.
Nevertheless it would be interesting to hear whether any other people are testing Gnome3 and KDE4 and of their experience.
I am personally currently running xfce4 on a PWS600 and it works (mostly).
qt4-X11_4.7.3 is a 204 MB source package, and probably complex enough to trigger whatever compiler bugs may be lurking about. Current thought isto try a non-optimized build and see if that cures most of the KDE4 segfault issues. Default Alpha compiler is still version 4.4 rather than 4.6. I don't know that 4.6 fixes any optimizer issues.
Likely it does. I did know of one optimisation bug in gcc-4.4 that is fixed in gcc-4.5.
Doing a test with optimisation turned off (or maybe using -O1) may be a worthwhile test. If the ES45s would arrive I could do some of this testing. [The courier has now advised that the "cargo is missing". How does one lose two ES45s on a palette? It's not as if you could step over it without stubbing your toe!]
Cheers Michael.