nvidia trouble and breaking in a supposedly LTS release

[Mark Greenwood]

On Monday 17 May 2010 15:24:52 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
> 
> 
You fell fowl of an installer bug. Did you install from an alternate CD? I can't believe they haven't fixed this yet. You need to install the package linux-headers-generic (and get some sleep ;-) ). And possibly you will have to do this every time a new kernel gets released... This has been reported but it seems that bugs that make your system unuseable are less important than ones that affect the looks of the bootup logo...... sigh.

Mark