It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted here, but I’ve always remained a regular Haiku user. It used to be my main OS, but I’ve been using Linux a bit more these days, because of limitations in my (old) version of the OS.
However, a really annoying kicker suddenly showed up last night! It all seemed to start when I decided to change the resolution on just one workspace. This caused all sorts of problems with layout and so on, but in particular Workspaces started wandering all over the place and ended up (as shown by its settings file) way off screen! I finally got it back (not sure how) and Workspaces is seated properly at bottom right of all spaces, but now – ~50% of the time — any click on a new workspace turns the display backlight *off*, so the display goes black! As far as I can tell, it’s just the backlight – e.g audio continues to play –, but I haven’t found any solution other than rebooting.
Does anyone have any clue as to what might be causing this? As I had no problems before I tried changing the resolution, I suspect that is the cause somehow, but that doesn’t make much sense! I have a little script that shows the BMessage in a settings file but that looks normal for Workspaces.
Are you sure it’s the backlight?
In the past I’ve changed the resolution of one workspace, but the resolution/refresh-rate combo didn’t work on my display. It was out-of-range or whatever. Maybe that’s your issue, too.
You can open the Screen prefs, choose “All workspaces” from the pop-up at the top and change e.g. the colour depth, then “Apply”. Then change back the colour depth and “Apply” again.
Now all workspaces should use the working settings.
Yep – 100%. If the backlight is on, even if the screen is ‘black’, there is always some residual light if you switch the room light away. Here, the screen was pitch black, even in the dark. It would happen on some random space switch (maybe after one or two successful ones).
I didn’t change anything except the resolution and that seemed to work fine, so I don’t think my problem is the same as yours. I’ll try your suggestions though. What I don’t understand is why Workspaces would have any connection to whatever controls the backlight! Its too late to investigate more tonight, but I’ll continue tomorrow.
BTW, is there any standard way of editing the BMessage in a settings file? I’d hazard a guess that that is where the problem is. (When it was off-screen, I could see that the rectangles were crazy, but if I deleted the preferences, they always came back the same! I probably killed Workspaces and deleted the settings file to cure that, but the cure was accidental!)
I should mention that I have an even older (!) Haiku partition. Workspaces is still working fine there. So I’m fairly sure it’s something in the settings.
“Kottan” does the job nicely as long as it’s standard types like int, string, or BRect. Doesn’t work with “raw” data.
I just tried. Works here, as long as I quit the Workspaces applet before renmaing/deleting its settings.
I’m a bit confused which settings file you were talking about. There’s ~/config/settings/Workspaces_settings for the options+position of the Worspaces applet, and ~/config/settings/system/app_server/workspaces for the workspace resolution, mode, brightness colour etc.
Thanks… Once again I’m stymied by my old version of Haiku! HaikuDepot says kottan ‘requires’ a newer version of Haiku. (From experience it probably doesn’t, but depot doesn’t give me the option of loading it anyway…) I *have* to update my Haiku!
Ahhh… Thanks! I never managed to spot this:
~/config/settings/system/app_server/workspaces
I was wondering where Workspaces got its other info from! The first time I tried deleting it, I probably forgot to kill Workspaces first, and everything just came back again, but when I did everything in proper sequence, things went back to normal! Many thanks, Humdinger!
I still have no idea why the backlight was getting killed, but things are now fixed, so it will have to remain a mystery!
BTW Humdinger, I’m sort of new at this interface… Are you getting a new email each time I do an edit? If so, I’m sorry! I’ll try to limit them in the future!
There are keyboard shortcuts to switch workspaces, it’s Ctrl-Opt-F1/F8 (Opt can be Atl or win key based on your settings). If you get stuck in a black screen workspace you can at least switch back to something visible while you diagnose the problem.
You could try to clone the Kottan repo and build it yourself under your oldie Haiku (and hope it doesn’t use new API calls or find alternatives for those).
Thankfully, no.
Should be just ALT+Fx or CTRL+ALT+CursorKeys for spatial switching (up/down/left/right).
I had this black screen problem happen a few times, and there was no way to get out of it. The display logic in the graphics card got in a bad state that the driver doesn’t recover from.
Clearly there’s more work to do on the mode setting code.
I’m pretty sure that’s just due to some issue with the recipe and not the application itself.
Let me know what version of Haiku you are on and I’ll check if Kottan builds correctly under it.
To the Haikuports guys: I don’t see a specific minimum version set in the recipe. Can I somehow lower the minimum Haiku version required in the recipe?
Kottan doesn’t use any particularly new API features, at least not that I’m aware of. So it should build on any Haiku version that’s not too ancient. I think it even builds with gcc 2, even though I never had that in mind during development.
Maybe some adjustments to the Makefile related to the linking stage could be needed, because of changes to BColumnListView.
If Kotan has been updated/rebuild on buildmasters past the date from OP install, it will need the OP to update the system to match that or rebuild Kotan on his own system as suggested by @humdinger
Haikuporter runs builds using the latest commit in the beta branch. The recipes as a result depend on that.
It should be a stable version that should cause no problems when updating (we are very careful about what gets merged to the beta branch).
I don’t know what version Pete is running, maybe an earlier version of beta 5 (in which case an update of just the Haiku package should be safe), maybe an older beta, in which case, that’s indeed not really supported by Haikuports at the moment.
Glad I’m not the only one to get hit by this! (Sorry about the slghtly slow reply — I’ve been a bit busy…)
Purely inertia! I have a slight phobia about updates, too. The other day, Fiefox on Linux decided to update itself! (No idea, but I didn’t tell it to!) It was only from 144 to 149, but a lot of the features I was used to seem to have changed under me and I can’t get them back! I’m about to do the update now, though.
OK – I finally got the update done, and things are not good. ‘media-addon-server’ always throws an error on startup. I can restart it with a double click in the servers folder, and task-monitor says it’s running, but the volume-control bar says “no mixer” and the bar is faded out. I ran the debugger to see what it said, and I see this(edited):
"AudioMixerControl
Debugger0:BTimeSource:PerformanceTimeFor:performance time too large
thread: multi_audio audio output stopped for debugging"
Does this mean anything to anybody?
Worse, though, I just did an sha256sum check, and the result bears no relation to the checksum given on the download page! Stupid question: I assume the sum is not in any way dependent on anything but the actual file contents, because I changed the name of the file for convenience! It’s a real bummer anyway because the download took two hours! (I don’t have fiber – just DSL). I don’t suppose anyone has a beta5 CD or USB-stick they could loan me? I’ll send my mailing address if so. I’m in Berkeley, CA.
Aargh! That’s not really much help, because I don’t want another 2-hour download. Is the haiku system hpkg itself available anywhere, as that’s essentially all I assume I need? Or could someone even just email it to me? I don’t think it would overload the system. It also doesn’t explain why the checksums don’t match…
‘media-addon-server’ always throws an error on startup. I can restart it with a double click in the servers folder, and task-monitor says it’s running, but the volume-control bar says “no mixer” and the bar is faded out. I ran the debugger to see what it said, and I see this(edited):