nvidia trouble and breaking in a supposedly LTS release

[William Hamra]

so after my fresh installation of lucid last week, everything was
working like a charm, i had nvidia-current installed, compositing
working great, i still am pissed i cant install manually from nvidia's
website, but that's fine, as long as ubuntu keep up with the drivers and
provide the latest driver. so far so good, except for the nagging popup
that i have some updates, which i was delaying since i had better uses
for the bandwidth, mainly setting up all my *important* programs, from
firefox, to flash, java, thunderbird, vlc, various codecs and amsn.
24 hours ago, i decided to update. 100+ megabytes of data got
downloaded, and few hours later, the installation started, it included a
new kernel, and new nvidia drivers, all went fine. all until reboot.
no X, no nvidia modules loaded, no nothing. over the past 16 hours(yes,
i haven't slept yet in over 35 hours), i have been trying to fix this,
with a combination of dropping to root shells using recovery option,
using alternate CD to get a chrooted root shell, and normal booting. i
assumed it was the kernel causing this, doing an lsmod showed that
ati_agp was loaded as agp_gart, which was just wrong, my motherboard
chipset and internal VGA is ATI, but that's disabled since i have a
nvidia geforce 8500 installed and plugged to screen. nvidia's drivers
still aren't working, and even worse, if a xorg.conf configured for
nvidia exists, or there's no xorg.conf at all, the screen goes off as
soon as kdm starts, which means i have to blindly go to TTY1, and hit
ctrl-alt-del to reboot, and use the alternate CD, because even the
recovery option would give the same result, which makes no sense, it's
text-mode, why would it do that? i suspect it has to do something with
plymouth, but i cant be fessed to mess with that now.
eventually, i started checking aptitude changelog for all packages i
suspect to have problems, i notice alberto milano patched something in
nvidia that deals with the auto-configuration and selection of a VGA,
and realized that could be it. i have no idea why he is doing this now,
but i find his past work, namely the Envy driver installer far better
and stable than his new work for jockey, he could have delayed that to
10.10, but no, knowing canonical and ubuntu too well now, they barely
care about stability anymore. i dont believe for one, that they dont
have a nvidia machine to test on, this is an LTS release, how can they
approve such an update AFTER the system was released??
i rolled back to the previous nvidia-current package, for some reason,
dkms isnot configuring it for the new kernel, but that's fine, i am
using the old one now, waiting for some new updates, hopefully sometime
this year....
sorry for the rant, but this is really unacceptable for a *stable* release.

-- 
Willy K. Hamra
Manager of Hamra Information Systems
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