ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

["Daniel Richard G." <skunk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

(Sorry for not following up sooner; I am currently travelling and my
Internet access has been sporadic.)

Geir, my concern is that the Intel hardware on which these freezes have
been occurring is quite common, and that reflects very poorly on the
development side of things. It's one thing if this were on old 3dfx
Voodoo boards, or NVidia boards with the Nouveau driver, but Intel?

It wouldn't be so bad if there were some sort of straightforward
fallback that could be used. I saw something somewhere about downgrading
the Intel driver to version 2.4 (IIRC), that this makes some problems go
away. But this required the use of a PPA, gave no assurance that it
would address any specific problem, and otherwise was not connected to
the Intel driver developers in any way (i.e. no one who actually knows
what's going on with the Intel driver was saying anything like "if the
latest stuff is giving you headaches, this is the last known-good
version, and we recommend you use that until we shake out the bugs.")

It's bad enough that no one (yet) knows what's going on with this bug,
but the worse part is that no one foresaw that this sort of problem
might arise, and so no workarounds went into the release (nor -updates,
nor -backports as of yet). So we're left in a situation where the latest
Ubuntu release is unusable for people with some very common Intel video
hardware, unless you're willing to run experimental PPA packages with
Git pull dates in the version strings. I.e. the worst possible outcome
for everyone involved.

I can accept that this bug was triggered by a kernel change, and so may
have flown under everyone's radar until late in the game. But the lack
of any good options for disabling the troublesome cutting-edge
functionality, or reverting to an older version of the driver that is
known to work, or anything else that a mostly-newbie can do to get the
system back into a usable state, is inexcusable. I can't believe that
Canonical would have no better response than "Wait till Lucid, it might
just possibly run on your stock Dell system without freezing."

-- 
[i845G] Display freezes (except for mouse pointer) without warning
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/484020
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X,
which is the registrant for xf86-video-intel.