[Lubuntu] Some PC's or LTSP clients stall during boot at a blank, black screen

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 12/08/2012 01:17 PM, John Hupp wrote:

> Can I force usage of a certain driver?  I read that this was
> supported with xorg.conf, but that does not exist by default now, and
> I think Xorg uses an automated configuration system called KMS, about
> which I know next to nothing.  But perhaps a configuration via
> xorg.conf is still respected/supported?

Yes, it should be.  Also you can (in conventional desktop Linux, and so
I assume also in LTSP) pass parameters to the kernel that will affect
which video driver is used.  You might, for example find that adding
something like

  video=fbdev

to the client kernel boot options would cause it to use a generic
framebuffer based graphics driver that could work where using all the
capabilities of a card/chip-specific driver is failing.  I don't know
how to tell LTSP to pass custom parameters to the client kernel, but it
should be doable in a configuration file somewhere.

One further comment: some of the cards/chips you list seem very old
indeed (mid to late 1990s?), and some seem to me to be relatively
uncommon.  If it is practical for you to buy and install some older AGP
or PCI graphics cards on the (desktop) LTSP client machines you have,
spending $20 per machine (new items, on ebay, for example nVidia MX440
AGP cards, or Radeon 7000 or X600 or 9250 cards) might be worth
exploring, compared to spending hours debugging graphics drivers for the
each of the many different cards/chipsets you currently have available.
 In a sense this is "giving up" on a free "just fix the software"
solution, but if your time has value, it should perhaps  be considered.

Jonathan