Mint 11 and Sandy Bridge: Better but I still need your help

[turqoisehex]

First of all, congratulations to the Mint team on a great release! Compared to 10, I'm finding 11 much more compatible with Sandy Bridge.

However, I'm still having a few challenges. I've decided to post them all together, since I believe they're all related to hardware support, primarily because I wasn't having any of them before upgrading to Sandy Bridge, and upgrading to the latest BIOS greatly to improved things (but that was before upgrading to M11).

The (probably) easy one:
In Mint 11 Compiz works out of the box!!... but it doesn't turn on until I reload it with Fusion Icon. How can I have it enabled on load?

The harder ones:

• While downloading package indexes with “sudo apt-get update”, I occasionally get “Something wicked happened resolving... (-5 - No address associated with hostname)”. I also get DNS errors from chromium. My IP is set to static, and all other computers on the network are networking normally.
• My network speed drops extremely low on LAN and internet, as low as 2mbps on LAN and only a few Kbps over internet. Less commonly, it stops altogether.
• Copying files on the same disk tops out at 5mbps (25mbps used to be normal)
  All three of these come and go without warning or obvious cause.

Digital audio (toslink fiber optic) doesn't work, regardless of hardware settings under “Sound”.

The worst,
And the hardest to pin down, is the kernel panics. I'm sure there's a log somewhere that will give me more information, but at the moment all I know is that it happens most frequently during the first minute of being in the session.

Details:
Mint 11 32-bit DVD, 2.6.38-8-generic-pae. Motherboard is Gigabyte H67N-USB3-B3, F5 BIOS.

Normally I would try a variety of things before posting and asking for help, but in this scenario I honestly don't know where to begin. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks very much.

[eiver]

In Mint 11 Compiz works out of the box!!... but it doesn't turn on until I reload it with Fusion Icon. How can I have it enabled on load?

Strangely enough, I experience the same thing when Mint 11 is installed on a VirtualBox machine (the host is Sandy Bridge too, but I am not sure this is relevant).

[lmintnewb]

Just a suggestion, might try bee bopping on over to the ubuntu forums and see if people there are having similar issues with newer buntu stuff. Hopefully producing solutions to such probs. Even though think Mint is mucho better than buntu. The two are so closely related. Summin that's buggy in one, probably buggy in the other. Same for fixes being likely to work in either and buntu presumably has a much larger userbase. Thus much more activity and likely often solutions to be found in their forums for Minters having issues they cannot figure out. Well ... that applies to any ubuntu based Mint releases o course.

[turqoisehex]

...the host is Sandy Bridge too, but I am not sure this is relevant

I'm not sure if it's relevant, but it is interesting! Are you experiencing any of the other problems, and do you experience any of them on the host? Maybe I need to do an RMA...

[eiver]

On the host I still use Mint 10 and I have no OS related problems with Sandy Bridge.

[turqoisehex]

On the host I still use Mint 10 and I have no OS related problems with Sandy Bridge.

did you install XorgEdgers and update the Kernel to get everything working, or did it work out of the box? What about compiz? Do you use integrated graphics?

[eiver]

No. On VirtualBox the card is virtualized, so I do not know which brand does it immigrate it seems to work out-of-the-box after all updates and after installing the guest additions. On the host I use Geforce 570, so the integrated card remains offline. I will try Mint 11 directly on the host soon, but I am sure that many people already tried that before me, so lets hear what they have to say.

Because Compiz works even in virtualized environment, but there is this issue with compiz not being loaded automatically after log on, I suspect some incorrect default system configuration in the Mint image...