ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

[Bryce Harrington <bryce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since this bug report is being linked to by news stories, it is getting
viewed by many people with nvidia bugs that fail in similar ways but due
to unrelated causes.  I'd like to direct them to more appropriate bug
reports:

The "blinks on reboot" issue is a bug in gdm, bug #441638.  That
blinking symptom will occur for any sort of failure of X to start, and
there are a lot of reasons why X may not start, so be aware that just
because someone else is reporting this same blinking behavior does not
necessarily mean you have the same underlying cause as them, so keep
digging.  This is causing lots of confusion in bug reports.

For those who have upgraded since Intrepid or earlier, there is an issue
reported where /sbin/lrm-video can cause nvidia to fail loading.  That
file no longer exists in Jaunty or Karmic and you can safely delete it
as a work around.  Bug #467490 describes this issue.  I don't know how
common this is, but if it is common we may need to make sure the
upgrader removes the file properly.  Manually uninstalling all nvidia
packages *might* clear the file.

For people running -rt kernels, such as Ubuntu Studio users, -nvidia has
a known incompatibility there, see bug #464125 for example.  Similar
situation for -pae kernels, see bug #454220 as a recent example.

Someone mentioned that "the upgrader disables the proprietary drivers".
According to mvo, that is not correct, or at least not intentional.
However, the upgrader *does* remove driver entries from xorg.conf if the
driver is no longer present after upgrade.  As far as I know, this
should all work seamlessly for people, however several people have
reported that removing their xorg.conf and reinstalling -nvidia helped,
so it is possible there is an error in this logic.  If you suspect this
is the case, what we need is a full bug report filed using 'ubuntu-bug
xorg'; in particular we need to see the xorg.conf files so we understand
how the upgrader is misbehaving.

I see a lot in forum articles the advice that "the solution" is to
remove "nvidia" or "fglrx" lines from xorg.conf.  While this may help in
getting the system functioning again, please note that it is not a
solution - it merely turns off the proprietary drivers.  Whatever the
original problem was is still there, you're just using different video
drivers.  Also, be aware that both nvidia and fglrx install GL and other
libraries on top of the normal system libraries, so if you install one
of those drivers and then use something else, it may work for 2D but you
may run into severe problems for 3D.  This is also a known issue - bug
258038 describes one possible solution we will be considering for Lucid.
It's a hard problem to solve for proprietary drivers though.

There are almost certainly more nvidia bugs, but we also have plenty of
other bug reports (over 300 against -nvidia so far), many of which have
been reported using ubuntu-bug so are closer to having the information
we need.

Finally, regarding people skills, actually after thousands of X bug
reports those get worn down to a raw nub so I don't think I have them
any more.  All that's left is a grumpy X maintainer.

** Changed in: xorg (Ubuntu)
       Status: Won't Fix => Invalid

-- 
upgrade breaks graphic drivers and x, preventing login or startx
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/464591
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