nvidia trouble and breaking in a supposedly LTS release

[Goh Lip]

On 05/17/2010 07:37 PM, William Hamra wrote:
> 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.
>
>


Not sure if this would help, but is xserver-xorg-video-nouveau installed?

Regards - Goh Lip