Testing Kubuntu Karmic, and KDE 4.3 Beta. This is going to be a great release! KDE 4.3 Beta is much improved from the 4.2.3 I’ve played with recently, all small things, and I’m sure I haven’t found them all yet. One has to be careful updating this thing though, yesterdays updates broke KDE totally, good thing I have fluxbox installed to fall back to when things break. And they will break, this is an alpha release afterall. There’s not a medibuntu repository set up for Karmic, so the Apple trailers won’t play, but everything else is working, Amarok can play daap streams again, pulseaudio seems to be working very well as my Audigy card now again outputs same signal to front and side speakers like I want it to. Flash videos don’t eat as much cpu as they used to.
I installed Kubuntu Karmic Alpha 1 on my main desktop, Athlon XP 2600+ , 1,5 GB ram, Nvidia 6200 AGP and 40GB /, 80 GB /home with ext4 as file system. It’s using less than 500 megs of memory as I type this while Amarok is playing in the background and Firefox running with 1 whole tab open. I realized I suck at writing reviews, so I’ll shut up and post some pictures for you instead, ok? 
While I was taking these, Ksnapshot caused KDE to become unresponsive to anything but ctrl + alt + del bringing up the shutdown menu, and I found out ctrl + alt + backspace is disabled. Annoying.
-
-
-
-
This is what to expect with alpha software.
-
The calendar has gained some new features, you now get to see the holidays marked in red on the calendar. Configurable too by Country. This one is showing all holidays in Finland.
You can find out more about KDE 4.3 here, and about Koala here.
If you wonder about the theme I’m using, it’s called air and available on http://www.kde-look.org
Brenan 7:54 pm on December 13, 2008 Permalink
Thanks for posting this. I had been searching on google for a good while and I finally stumbled upon your post. The iommu=noaperture worked for me – ubuntu 64bit, AMD Phenom 9850 BE and Asus Mobo (790FX chipset)
magnusium 10:23 pm on December 13, 2008 Permalink
I’m glad you found it useful.
zappafan 6:59 am on December 15, 2008 Permalink
Thanks from me, too. I have an ASUS M2N-SLI Mobo, Ubuntu 8.10 64bit, 4GB, Athlon 64×2 5600+. I found something also on the ASUSTeK support site that sent me here:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-8174/README/32bit_html/appendix-l.html
Scroll down a bit and there’s an IOMMU section.
magnusium 7:57 am on December 15, 2008 Permalink
Thanks, this was educational.
quote:
On AMD’s AMD64 platform, the size of the IOMMU can be configured in the system BIOS or, if no IOMMU BIOS option is available, using the ‘iommu=memaper’ kernel parameter. This kernel parameter expects an order and instructs the Linux kernel to create an IOMMU of size 32MB^order overlapping physical memory. If the system’s default IOMMU is smaller than 64MB, the Linux kernel automatically replaces it with a 64MB IOMMU.
end quote
So this means that one can try iommu=memaper, if the noaperture and soft fails.
Sander 12:52 am on December 27, 2008 Permalink
Hi,
I think that by adding “iommu=…” only the message will go away, but you won’t get the 64 MB memory back.
Easy way to check: use “free -m” in both cases (with and without the option iommu=…), and see if there’s any difference.
Please let us know.
Sander 12:57 am on December 27, 2008 Permalink
PS:
There is some discussion and info on http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1018854
magnusium 11:57 am on December 27, 2008 Permalink
I’ll have to subsribe to that thread, I don’t have Ubuntu on my laptop right now, had to go to “that other OS” for a while. But it won’t be long before I put Ubuntu back on it.
My acer will not POST if I put the onboard graphics mem to less than 256 in my BIOS settings, tried it once and I had to rip out a stick of RAM to get back in to change the setting.