[Bug 475518] [NEW] screwy screen management; black screen soon after init

[Peter Belmont]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: initramfs-tools

I just upgraded Ubuntu "on-line".
Black screen on or immediately after establishing normal user screen.
Extreme slowness in response to mouse clicks.
Interaction with "awn" and "avant-window-monitor".

History:

A day or so before the UPGRADE was first announced, I had installed
"awn" "avant-window-navigator" and support s/w. It worked quite well!

Then I did the UPGRADE (to karma) which the automatic UPDATE and UPGRADE
mechanism invited me to do.

All display things suddenly became very, very slow.  Slow development of
window displays (rectangular part-images appearing very slowly one after
the other). Slow response to mouse-clicks.

I --purged "awn" and "avant-window-navigator" and associated s/w and the
problem changed to a problem of sudden-onset black-deaths, described
below. The slowness seemed fixed or improved.

I then added " i915.modeset=0" to grub line-2, the "kernel" line.
[that's zero, not oh]

NOW I observe four phenomena:

[1] " i915.modeset=0" is not recognized as an option by GRUB. 
This line-fragment becomes an apparent NO-OP.

[2] there is a very disturbed display early in the boot (the phase when
Ubuntu sometimes tests the hard disk and says ESC to continue w/o the
disk testing). The display system is already screwy here, showing
multiple badly (dis)placed lines with the red progress marker

[3] after login (GNOME-style) I get the usual screen
   showing testing for (and finding of) wifi,
   showing all the usual icons on top line.

HOWEVER, the black-screen hits soon thereafter, even without any action
by me, but sooner still if I click on (for example) SUNBIRD calendar: in
this case the display-software (slowly) develops the fully elaborated
display and then DIES (black screen).  This "black screen" seems to be a
response to some demand made by s/w of the DISPLAY system.

EARLIER, there was also a problem of extreme SLOWNESS in developing
displays AND ALSO in response to mouse clicks: for instance, in using
THUNDERBIRD EMAIL, a click of a FOLDER resulted in a long wait before
the emails in that folder would be listed in the upper box. I believe
that removal of "awn" fixed the slowness problem.

[4] alt-ctl F3 still works after the "black screen".

** Affects: initramfs-tools (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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screwy screen management; black screen soon after init
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/475518
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