Hi.
I’ve been running Ubuntu in this laptop (Acer 1810TZ) since 2010 without any problem, just it is a slow laptop. Then I switched to Manjaro back in 2016, camera stopped working, but I wanted to try this rolling release thing anyways. It has been in service until 2019, when a kernel update broke things up. Linux 4.4 LTS works well (no camera though), but Linux 5 won’t load. I used manjaro kernel utility to go back to the old version, but with every update it messed things again.
Since I have a Win PC, I forgot about the laptop for a while, but now I want to make it work again so the kid doesn’t play in my PC.
I learned what caused the problems in the updates, a package called linux-latest that installed again the latest kernel, even if it does not work in my laptop. So I removed this package, removed linux 5.6, and reinstalled 4.4 LTS. It loaded again, without the need to switch to Alt-F2 to force a startx. But it was too sloggy. mhwd told me that the video driver was not loaded, so I enabled video-linux. It turned out that the fault was the mandb process, who was running non stop. Killed the process, reinstalled man packages, and it looked good for a while.
Now I want to clean the start a little further, because after all these removals and installations I am afraid that it does not load as fast as it used to be.
systemd-analyze blame throws a total of 40 secs, 33 secs in user space.
Checking dmesg gives much more information.
I have a warning: “/usr/lib/systemd/system/plymouth-start.service:13: Unit configured to use KillMode=none”, that takes a few seconds.
Then it loses 3 seconds trying to load the webcam, which it fails to do.
Then it takes 8 seconds in “proc: unrecognized mount option “hidepid=invisible” or missing value”
Then an error: “drm:intel_enable_lvds [i915] ERROR timed out waiting for panel to power on”, but it does not take much time.
Finally, when I turn power off, there’s a bunch of messages saying that the watchdog process failed at something.
So, for the webcam driver, it’s a Microdia Sonix USB 2.0 (USB 0c45:6310). Allegedly, it should work with the uvc_driver, but it does not. mhwd says that I have to load uvcvideo, but modprobing it does nothing. I tried to follow a guide, but got lost on how to create a node. If nothing works, I’d prefer to ignore the device, so the system doesn’t waste time trying to load it.
The mount problem I would like to solve it, since it takes 8 seconds, but don’t know how to start.
The watchdog issue at shut down might be nothing, but it annoys me.
