Teleidoscope

Mon, Mar 26, 2007

Windows Emulation

Posted at 7:29 pm MDT to Technology

Well, I found some Tax software that is supposed to run on modern Linuxes with WinE, the Windows Emulation layer.

I found a version of WinE for 64-bit Kubuntu and got all the dependencies loaded, but my display locks up when I try to run it. There seems to be a bug in the ATI radeon and drm Xorg drivers (video drivers) distributed witht he 6.17 Linux kernel. The system locks up, and when I reboot, I find hundreds of messages like:

 
Mar 26 01:29:20 sophia kernel: [ 1640.335798] [drm:radeon_cp_reset] *ERROR* radeon_cp_reset called without lock held
Mar 26 01:29:20 sophia kernel: [ 1640.335823] [drm:radeon_cp_start] *ERROR* radeon_cp_start called without lock held
Mar 26 01:29:20 sophia kernel: [ 1640.335849] [drm:radeon_cp_idle] *ERROR* radeon_cp_idle called without lock held

I've had video lockups occasionally more or less forever on this laptop. Mostly there are a few things I'm careful to avoid doing, and things don't lock up.

But I'm annoyed enough about this tax software thing that I'm going to try installing a different video driver to see if it will fix things. This could be interesting...

7:15 pm Ready to reboot and try using the new driver.

7:30pm The reboot was clean, the new driver that doesn't use the drm module is working, and WinE no longer locks up the display.

Maybe tomorrow evening I'll actually do my taxes.

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