AV wizard freezes when selecting an audio input on MD only Core/Hybrid is fine

[garagevibes]

Hi all,

I'm currently pulling my hair out trying to get my Acer Revo to net boot as a MD and I really hope someone can help.

I will give you a quick overview of recent changes then explain the issue as it maybe related. 

So I had 0810 all working fine for about a year or two but recently my motherboard on my core just died so I got a new Asus board with an AMD phoneme which unlocked to 4 cores whooho.

Unfortunately the board has an ATI graphics card which I know isn't great plus it has the annoying r8168 gigabit ethernet chip as well so not really the best but it did get 4 cores up from a 2 core chip so its worth the extra work I thought and actually it does work quite well, I install the latest repo version of LinuxMCE 0810, then run a script to blacklist and recompile the correct ethernet driver and downloaded and installed the ATI driver from AMD's site and then LinuxMCE installed with ease and as far as I can see everything works fine and as expected on the hybrid.

So the issue I have given that the new core should have been the real pain in the arse and wasn't is with my Acer Revo, which is widely regarded as supported and every other time I have needed to reinstall my core on the old motherboard has never had an issue.
However now it PXE boots fine and the core runs the createdisklessMD.sh or something like that, then it reboots installs the Nvidia 195 drivers, reboots again then beeps and I press Q or 1 to get to the AV wizard as I'm connected through HDMI and its great and thus far all works as expected but then when I get to the select audio connection and I press on anything other than no sound it just freezes on the wizard and I never see the screen with the speaker to adjust the volume.

I did manually run the AV wizard from the terminal to get a bit more information and it shows when I select an audio connection that Xine plays an audio file but I never hear it and I can see any errors.

Also if I do select no sound in the wizard I get past the AV wizard and all the white text shows up but after it says starting onscreen orbiter I see a flicker of a window opening and then just a black screen with an operational mouse pointer.

As a result I first thought it must have something to do with the ALSA version so I tried first to install the alsa modules but that didn't help, so then I downloaded a script to manually download and compile ALSA to 1.0.24 but this also didnt help, so then I tried to download the latest Nvida driver from there site but this also hasn't fixed the issue.

The final steps I have now taken are reinstalling the whole system first with the latest snapshot and then with the currently recommended snapshot, then one I had from 2010 and another that I found from 2009 which I knew worked back then but had issues with the sources.list obviously

All installed fine on the core/hybrid but have the same issue with the MD, its driving me mad Please Please can someone offer some suggestions, the only thing I can think of is that the ATI driver is somehow affecting things on the core and that this then moves down to the diskless MD image, if thats the case I'm happy to disable the core's graphics card and buy an Nvida one to add in but would this really help?

Many thanks and sorry its a little long winded just thought the background my help.

Daniel


 

[garagevibes]

Ok So a little update, Yesterday evening I tried once again a fresh install but I decided to try and install from the repo using a slightly outdated installer script the version was beta 2.8 I think.

The reason being that I though maybe something had been updated recently that might not be playing nicely with my Acer Revo (r3610 I believe). During the install the ALSA driver was updated which i have found is now disabled by default and the core started straight away on the AV wizard I didn't even need to go get the ATI drivers like normal although I think it was using the VESA driver as the quality was crap.

As the ATI drivers were not installed I was hopeful that the Revo would this time make it through the audio section of the AV wizard but sadly the same issue arose when selecting any audio input it just freezes with no sound and if I select no sound the AV Wizard goes away builds the orbiter and then just hangs on a blank screen with a mouse.

Because of this Im sure the ATI driver in the core has no relation to the issue, I would be so grateful if someone could offer a few pointers, has anyone recently rebuild there core and had issues netbooting a Revo or any other Ion based Atom board?

Thanks again


Daniel 

[garagevibes]

Just another update, after spending about 2 weeks pulling my hair out over this issue I decided I would try plugging the MD into the Tv in the bedroom and all of a sudden it all worked without issue. But if I take the MD back to the main room and plug it in to the tv there the problem comes back again with a blank screen and a mouse.

So what the bloody hell is going on here, it would seem that there is no issue with the MD its just it doesn't play nicely with my LG Plasma, so does anyone have any to suggestions to fix this cos i'm stumped.

Thanks


Daniel

[bongowongo]

Does it have to do with refresh rates of the TV's?

[garagevibes]

Thanks Bongowongo I thought it could be related to the resolution but I have tried every refresh rate available on the AV wizard and the wizard still works (except being difficult to see what your doing at times) until I get to selecting an audio connection.

I have tried connecting via HDMI and via VGA with optical audio but both have the same issue, its so strange I didn't know there was that much communication between the device and the display until now.

The TV by the way is an LG 50PS6000, I have looked at the manual which is available here: http://www.lg.com/uk/tv-audio-video/televisions/LG-plasma-tv-50PS6000.jsp and this states that the best selection for VGA is 1920x1080 at 60Hz but I have already tried this without luck.

I also tried to enable the EDID in the Xorg.cong file and then even tried to create a modeline for the display as well but this also didn't work.

If I kill the AV wizard and run /usr/pluto/bin/Start_KDE.sh i get to the KDE desktop and the screen looks great it seems to just be when it creates anything interactive like audio on X11 that it freezes.

Does anybody have any other ideas.