I Was About To Give Up On Linux Mint

[mhbell]

Yes You read that right. I was almost ready to give up on Linux Mint which has been my primary Distro since Mint was first released. It appears that Mint has not kept up with the modern hardware and CPU's for Whatever reasons. The last 2 versions of Mint (Tara) and (Tessa) have both given me fits because of the Ryzen 3 2200 CPU with built in Graphics. The CPU has been out long enough that the Mint Dev's should have been able to support it and the 2400. The Ryzen 2200 and the 2400 are in many of the new PC's and laptops. Other distro's support those CPU's and Graphics why not mint. I finally solved my problems. I had 3 main problems with mint.

1. I Could not play MP4 video files and others. The screen was all garbled no matter what player I used or did.

2. When clicking on a link in email (Thunderbird) or any of the 3 browsers I have, the video or image would not play or open.

3. Random Freeze for unknown reasons and sometimes while doing important work or accessing a bank account.

 

I was about to give up when a couple of people One in stack Exchange and one in Mint forums steered me in the right direction. Here is how I solved my problems with mint.

 

I Installed the util called "UKUU" which makes it easy to install a Kernel in Mint or Ubuntu. I installed Kernel 4.18.0 and that solved part of Number 2 above. Mint is still using 4.15.47 as of today

 

next I downloaded and installed the latest Mesa. This took care of number 1 and 2 above. The mesa that Mint installed even with all of the updates was 18.8 The one I downloaded from Ubuntu swat updates PPA (add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/updates) using (glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version") I find that it installed.

(OpenGL version string: 4.5 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 19.0.2). As for number 3 above I'll just have to wait and see as the freeze was random.

 

I did all of this in Mint 19.1 Tessa.

Mel

[sunrat]

Nice work fixing it! Linux often takes a little while to catch up and support newer hardware. I think they're still doing Ryzen tweaks in the 5 series kernels.

Debian forums is full of posts like this especially when stable gets towards end of cycle like it is currently. Many threads which end in "upgrade your kernel and graphics stack from backports".

 

Interestingly this popped up in the "Also tagged" box here -

UKUU Gui Kernel Upgrad Util For Ubuntu and Mint Distros

 

Started by mhbell, 04 Apr 2017 kernel, gui, upgrades

[crp]

so Mint is not updating the kernel for new releases?

[securitybreach]

so Mint is not updating the kernel for new releases?

 

They do include an updated kernel in each release.

[raymac46]

I am a Mint and AMD fanboi for sure, but I have learned from bitter experience not to get too bleeding edge with AMD graphics. Right now I am chugging along with Mint 19.1 on a 2012 Piledriver APU and 2015 Bonaire based GPU. Even that GPU gave me headaches when it first was installed. Took a couple of kernel upgrades to fix it.

Even with Intel I would stay a generation or two back and in the case of my Ivy Bridge based Thinkpad I avoided the Optimus dual graphics and stuck with plain old Intel IGP.

I don't game with any Linux system so I can do this easily enough. If it ain't broke...

[securitybreach]

Why not just run the opensource xf86-video-ati driver instead? You will get just as good performance from the opensource driver as you will with the Catalyst driver. This is mostly because AMD helps to develop the open driver, unlike Nvidia with noveau.

[raymac46]

Actually when I first got the R7 360 GPU it was the open source driver that gave me all the grief with older kernels such as were used in Mint 17. I had to use the Catalyst driver at that point to avoid a black screen on bootup. The newer version of Mesa in Mint 18 wouldn't support Catalyst any longer - but the open source driver didn't work either. I stuck with Mint 17.3 and Catalyst for a while and then the 18.1 upgrade had a newer kernel that fixed the problem with the open source driver.

I agree that the AMD open source driver works a lot better than Nouveau - if it works.

[securitybreach]

Actually when I first got the R7 360 GPU it was the open source driver that gave me all the grief with older kernels such as were used in Mint 17. I had to use the Catalyst driver at that point to avoid a black screen on bootup. The newer version of Mesa in Mint 18 wouldn't support Catalyst any longer - but the open source driver didn't work either. I stuck with Mint 17.3 and Catalyst for a while and then the 18.1 upgrade had a newer kernel that fixed the problem with the open source driver.

I agree that the AMD open source driver works a lot better than Nouveau - if it works.

 

I just just be lucky as I never had an issue with AMD cards when I used them.

[raymac46]

I think that may be a happy by-product of your using Arch Linux. You always have the latest kernel, Xorg, Mesa... My problems arose because of outdated software on a fixed schedule release.

[securitybreach]

I think that may be a happy by-product of your using Arch Linux. You always have the latest kernel, Xorg, Mesa... My problems arose because of outdated software on a fixed schedule release.

 

Probably so...