Re: [Tails-dev] New support page /support/known_issues/graph…

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Autor: intrigeri
Data:  
Dla: The Tails public development discussion list
Temat: Re: [Tails-dev] New support page /support/known_issues/graphics
hi,

sajolida:
> - Shall we advertise people to try the "Troubleshooting Mode"? Does it
> help with graphics cards?


Yes, it adds "nomodeset" which is needed for some graphics cards.

> - Does it make sense to link to Redmine tickets? For example, #11095 for
> Radeon HD was closed because we had nothing else to do but the problem
> still exist.


> Is it worth making this information visible to users?


Only if the ticket is still open i.e. we think we can do something
about it: then the user can "Watch" the ticket and learn about new
experimental ISOs they can test etc.

> Is it helpful to keep it hidden in an HTML comment like I did?


Yes.

> - Is it worth keeping track of when each issue has been updated last?
> Here I'm proposing to keep this information in an HTML comment.


> This is information that we can get from the Git history (I tried and
> it takes a couple of minutes) but I thought that it might help
> cleaning the page from now and then. I thought about doing this for
> the other known issues pages as well.


In general, and for more atomically tracked issues: yes, great idea!

But in this case I'm not sure how we will able to use this info for
the intended purpose because the granularity of our entries is
very coarse (the fact we have updated something about a Radeon HD
model does not teach us much about the other ones).

> - It would be good to have names and IDs of graphics cards exactly as
> they are displayed to people.


Yes! As one of the main persons who updates this info I'll keep it in
mind.

> Right now I bet that it's not the case
> but the page will get better as people report errors.


I believe our current data is not that bad because I bet it comes
straight from the lspci output that's on top of WhisperBack reports
and that's what we tend to copy'n'paste. But we lack IDs and anyway:
yes, this will get better.

> Are their ways for Technical writers and Help desk to complete or
> verify this information? For example, could we answer questions like:


> - « How can I know the ID of "Radeon HD 8790M"? »


Generally:

  $ grep 8790M /usr/share/misc/pci.ids
    6606  Mars XTX [Radeon HD 8790M]


… will give you the device ID: 6606.

And then open /usr/share/misc/pci.ids, search for that entry, scroll
up to the first not-commented-out line that is:

1002 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]

… which gives you the vendor ID.

Then the ID of that device is 1002:6606.

> - « What name is displayed to the users of "Radeon HD 8790M"? »


Search pci.ids for something that looks like the name you know.
In this case that would be "Mars XTX [Radeon HD 8790M]".

> - Is the "(rev XXX)" part of the graphics card description relevant?


It's relevant: different hardware revisions of the same commercial
name may behave differently.

> If so I'll have to talk about "name, ID, and revision" instead of only
> "name and ID".


It depends of what you call the name. I think the name includes the
revision and cards with different revisions should have different PCI
IDs. But I'm not an expert at this and I did not check. Should I?

Anyway, your question seems to be about "Mention in your email […]
[the] name and ID of your graphics cards". In this context, I believe
the name will include the revision (and if it does not, then I don't
know how the user would find this info to report it to us, so well).

Cheers,
--
intrigeri