Hi everybody, I would greatly appreciate it if someone would take the time to look into this matter. I use aptosid (formerly known as sidux) on my computer for about 3 years. Beginning with 2.6.38 slh aptosid kernel the nvidia kernel module wouldn't load leaving my system inoperable.I tried all tricks in the book, reinstall nvidia-kernel-source , recompiled nvidia several times using -f , made sure dmakms is installed and running - all with no success. Than I posted a topic on the aptosid forum and received heavy beating from members who pointed out how ignorant and uneducated I am keeping telling me that it's all my mistake .Then I read one post that mentioned Liquorix kernel. I added repository and installed Liquorix kernel.After rebooting everything worked perfectly right from the beginning without any intervention on my part.And that is when I started feeling really stupid. Is it possible that on a system with wrongly configured nvidia module or dmakms as I was told by some aptosid forum users one kernel will work and another one won't ?I have spent hours trying to get aptosid kernel working with my nvidia card and have done absolutely nothing with Liquorix and it works. Why ? After admitting the fact on the aptosid forum I received even more beating for using Liquorix ,oh well...
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Aptosid is very ideological. Think so left or right that their decisions become impractical. That's the same thing in the US with politics - no one likes candidates that are so left or so right that they alienate half of the country.

The same thing happened in Sidux with the fglrx driver. Full RCU preemption was enabled back in the day which broke support for fglrx which used hooks that were not necessarily GPL dependent, but were set to that in the kernel source. Someone found a workaround by changing the license that the fglrx module was loaded under, but slh deliberately added a patch that further broke support for fglrx.

So if it was Steffan's intention to break support for fglrx, then he did his job. If it was not, then he has no intention to create a kernel for the users of sidux, but only himself. There was clearly an outcry and people needing help, but he ignored any requests to change the RCU preemption to classic, which would have alleviated the problem.

Furthermore, if Steffan did his research, he would have realized that the CPU scheduler was incapable of providing low latency desktop computing anyway, and enabling RCU preemption did not change that fact. Only later when BFS became popular did Ingo and some other kernel developers take a look and fix some latency bugs that were hidden under the rug until BFS exposed them all.

I once said to myself that I would stop building kernels once there was an equivalent prebuilt kernel package for everyone to download. But now I'm really frustrated that Steffan is doing absolutely nothing to help.

But to answer your question: you are not wrong. The moment they started to accuse you, they were trying to hide the fact that they know they're wrong. If the person attacking you on the forum knew what they were talking about, they would not need to attack you, because they could then explain why the nvidia driver is not working for you. Keep that in mind.

And sorry if I sound very aggressive here, I've been through what you have and it really pisses me off.

EDIT: I just took a look at your posts on aptosid - the last piece of information they needed was your dmesg. I guess we'll never know why slh's kernel would not load the nvidia module.
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Great thanks for your reply, the way you described it was exactly the way I felt about it. It was like in a situation when you have been hit by a bus and you are laying on the pavement bleeding and people surround you and instead of helping you they tell you how important is to follow all the rules while crossing in front of a bus, and you are trying to explain them that you had followed the rules precisely and still got hit by the bus and what you need right now is not the rhetorics but immediate help, but they have no idea how to help you and keep telling you it's all your fault ! When I mentioned that your kernel works for me they told me that if I would configure my system properly their kernel would also work. It's funny but aptosid's previous kernel caused the same problem with nvidia source package and someone on their forum proposed to contact Linus Torvalds to ask him make change in the kernel to work with aptosid . Einstein once said: "Two things are infinite.The Universe and human stupidity.I'm not sure about the Universe :-) "
By the way Liquorix kernel is awesome,I have faster boot and shutdown , thank you for your great work !!!
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Spaceferret

I agree with your and damentz's sentiments. I really don't think these guys have any notion of how insulting they are. And when you complain the sycophants come out of the woodwork (where were they when you asked for help?) to kick you as well.

The forks from Kanotix to sidux and now aptosid have all arisen from the arrogant attitudes of the present aptosid devs. Although I have been using linux since 2001 and Debian sid since the Kanotix days I rarely contribute to the aptosid forums due to the attacks I receive whenever I try to help someone.

The best thing you can do is avoid posting to aptosid forums and instead post to Tech-Patterns. Techadmin will always help if he can. I He was once a sidux dev until, as I understand it, he could no longer stand their attitude and personal attacks in the forums. Also some of the dis-affected Kanotix, sidux and aptosid members post here. You can also find more of them at forums.debian.net although the forum isn't so proficient.

I'm afraid the Aptosid distro has slowly eroded talent and no longer has the expertise and worst still the desire to help anyone. Witness the fact that it's no longer a dev who flags the dist-upgrade alerts nor supplies the fixes. And the aptosid wiki is almost empty whereas the sidux wiki was packed with useful tips and scripts. The only redeeming factor is the aptosid manual. It really does contains some useful stuff.

Why am I still an aptosid member? I suppose two (or more) heads are better than one. When I can't fix something perhaps someone at aptosid has found a fix.

NB. orbit is not my name on the aptosid forum (for obvious reasons). [/u]
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@orbit
Thank you for your feedback, it's comforting to know I'm not the only one who hit the brick wall trying to get help from aptosid devs. I also noticed the attitude difference since sidux has become aptosid, the concept is very exciting , but requires attention as any distro based on unstable branch.It doesn't take much to destroy the whole thing by just a single dist-upgrade which could remove half of your system due to unmatched dependencies. Dist-upgrade warnings are essential . A good example.When aptosid kernel used a patch preventing nvidia kernel module from loading many users including myself,switched to Flickerplatz kernel compiled by one of the users, not devs.I was stupid enough to do a d-u against his repository consisting the kernel, and at one time about 2 weeks ago I didn't pay attention and got several important packages removed , including initramfs-tools , after that I couldn't update kernel at all. The funny thing is that this particular user gave me the most beating when I asked for help.
It should be some reason why sidux use to be in a better position on the Distrowatch while aptosid is #30 in the last 12 month trailing Dreamlinux who's developers abandoned the project long time ago.
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I'm glad bluewater is still doing a good job running the manual. I also derive great satisfaction from having designed and coded the entire thing from the ground up behind the scenes, with bluewater's promise to not tell anyone, especially the core devs, that it was me doing all the code work. I insisted on that by the way because they were so incompetent re html and information design I refused to interact with them directly. But I do like seeing that one of the things people still find valuable was a core contribution by me, with bluewater, who has done a great job as time goes on as main editor (at least last I checked, which was a long time ago now). Bluewater has managed to avoid the contamination of the core devs just because he's older, retired, and worked in business his whole life so he knows how to ignore office politics.

I do not follow the aptosid guys anymore, they have made it very clear that they are not worth spending any time on, and any time some doubt might arise, they piss off the next person or group, who then leaves them behind, until there's just that stale core of essentially just pure fanboys and technically irrelevant members, a blight on the world of free and open source software, made even worse by their pretending to even have a clue about what free software is all about, which is of course, the end user's rights and ability to do whatever they want with their systems.

Can't comment on the current status of any devs or group members, beyond seeing a name and stupid posting now and then on the internet, usually from one of their worst fanboys, otherwise don't pay any attention to them, but they are every bit as bad as anyone here or elsewhere thinks, I promise you that, much worse actually, in my opinion. Some major issues in a few key people in that project and that will never get fixed until they are removed, but that would leave very little in the way of anything of substance there so it's best to just let them drift off out to sea on their own pointless geek shrinking dreamworld.
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I have an eye opening experience here thanks to the feedback from former sidux team members. I'm glad I have found Liquorix kernel and therefor this great forum !
When I first experienced sidux after some years of distro- hopping I was blown away by it, it installs in less than 15 min, and it was very encouraging to anyone who wants to learn more about Debian and Linux in general. The manual was excellent and their forum responsive and helpful. However at some point things begun to change. Members would post upgrade warnings and team members would remove them just to admit later they weren't aware of any problems. The aptosid forum is not that helpful anymore,it resembles rather an exercise in rhetorics than anything else.However, I'm not going to give up , that's why they call it World Wide Web , I'm pretty sure I can find competent people besides aptosid forum :-)
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I never used sidux or aptosid, never had any contact with the devs, but that problem with the NVidia module and the slh kernels just blows me away. The cause of it was a kernel config option, the big kernel lock, which was in the process of being deprecated. aptosid just turned it off before everything was quite ready for that. It was an extremely simple problem with an extremely simple fix.

NVidia has since permanently fixed this on the 270 drivers, and the option is gone from 2.6.39, so by now it's a non-issue. Just blows my mind though...

Edit: Guess I jumped to conclusions as to what your problem was - somebody else had posted an NVidia-installer log here, I just assumed you had the same problem:
techpatterns.com/forums/about1831.html
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@trulan That is exactly what happen in my case, after slh kernel update the nvidia kernel module wouldn't load no matter what I tried,I posted the topic on the aptosid forum describing this problem just to find out it's all my mistake, I'm ignorant and don't want to learn (despite the fact I've been using aptosid since 2009 quite successfully) Than I tried Liquorix kernel instead and it worked right away. I asked the devs why is that their kernel doesn't seem to work and liquorix does work,the answer was because you're ignorant. I checked out the forum today and guess what, this is what I found out :

do not dist-upgrade! PostPosted: 15.05.2011, 18:26
an error in the positinstall file of linux-image-2.6.38-6.slh.2-aptosid prevents its configuration during install.
please wait until the issueis fixed. if too late, reboot into old kernel

Now, who is ignorant ?
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spaceferret:

Yes I saw that and gave a chuckle. The other thing that really irks me is that often a dev's response shows they've haven't paid attention to the op's text and, in consequence, attribute to him some totally unwarranted and derogatory remark.

Apart from the dev's attitude I find living with aptosid a challenge but not an insurmountable one. I find, with some caveats, it's relatively easy to maintain a Debian sid based installation on your own. Not for a beginner perhaps but for someone with some experience, patience and attention to detail it can be done.

I'm not a programmer (although I once wrote a simple database for a swimming club back in my Atari days. Yes I'm old) so I rely totally on my knowledge of the Debian system I've gained over the years and that the package maintainers know what they are doing.

In the main it pays to have a dist-upgrade strategy which works for you.

Step one for me is to always check aptosid before I do a dist-upgrade although this is becoming less useful as some warnings have lately been arriving too late. I especially check the aptosid site if there is a dist-upgrade affecting the system config, X or desktop and maybe even wait a couple of days to see what other have to say.

Secondly I've installed some tools that I find useful eg. apt-listbugs and synaptic (to check newly arrived package) etc. Any bugs that apt-listbugs throws up are checked at the Debian bug site for show stoppers or relevance ie. affects a different architexture, breaks tools I don't use etc.

Thirdly I always do a simulated dist-upgrade (-s option) before installation. It's surprising how many debacles I've avoided doing a simulated dist-upgrade.

Providing you pay attention to what the tools tell you and use your head you can, for the most part, get along on your own. For the times when this fails you will, as I do, have to fall back on your own knowledge and that of others.
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