nvidia trouble and breaking in a supposedly LTS release

[William Hamra]

On 05/17/2010 05:24 PM, Goh Lip wrote:
> 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
> 
yup, i have xserver-xorg-video-all which depends on nouveau and many others.

-- 
Willy K. Hamra
Manager of Hamra Information Systems
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