Many, many serious problems with Ubuntu

Thu Jul 25 10:42:32 UTC 2013

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 6:20 AM, Dale Amon <amon at vnl.com> wrote:

> I have held back from putting in this report for a very long time
> as my experience reading this list has led me to believe that no
> one will much care because Granny Would Never Do That and she
> certainly Would Never Know How to Do That.
>
> I have a Thinkpad W520. I have identical second screens, Acer's, at
> home and at work. The laptop moves back and forth with me and thus
> makes the transition back and forth twice a day. I use Mate for my
> work space. I can't stand Unity. Matter of taste and habits. I made
> my choice and it was to stay with what for me worked far better.
>
>
When I read comments that Unity is not nice, or in your case, "you cannot
stand Unity",
then I feel something is fundamentally wrong.
I feel that you have been influenced by the anti-Ubuntu/anti-Unity crowd,
and due to this, even if simple tasks somehow fail, you are not versatile
enough to adapt and change something.
I have been using computers for quite some time, and I tried a few
graphical environments.
It is doable to switch from one environment to another, as the basic
requirement is just to start applications.
A dislike for Unity is evidence for deeper issues.

> In order to use the VGA connector, I have the BIOS set to the Discrete
> Graphics Mode.
>

So you have a laptop with two graphics cards?
If one card is an NVidia, then you need bumblebee,
http://bumblebee-project.org/
And you may need a recent version in case older versions have some bug.

>
> When I boot, one of three things happens:
>
>         * A blue screen of death before even the grub screen appears
>         * A large blinking cursor at the top left of a black screen
>           just after the grub screen selection is made.
>         * A successful boot where the large blinking cursor turns into
>           a small blinking cursor after some interval and then
>           it goes to the encryption password screen and the boot
>           suceeeds from there.
>
> In neither of the fault cases does the system print any state info
> or give me any diagnostics whatever. All of these problems existed with
> Oneiric and still existing with Raring.
>
> That is just one set of problems I include so that one might understand
> the further miseries.
>

Depending on which two graphics cards you have,
you need a recent X.Org so that both cards are supported.

>
> The second issue is that sometimes, on a whim, the screen manager will
> get confused. One of these cases happens if I connect the VGA connector
> to the closed laptop and fail to open the lid fast enough. In that case
> it decides the Acer is screen one and it makes it the primary screen.
> Opening the laptop at that point does nothing and the situation
> deteriorates
> from there. If you log out and back in again the screen manager misassigns
> things; it will not reset the sizes of either screen and attempts to do
> so result in a patchwork quilt on the laptop screen. The Acer screen
> remains
> dark. You cannot get out. A logout hangs even if you can manage it. If you
> try F2 to get to VT2, it hangs. Total hang, mouse cursor frozen. You have
> no choice but to kill the power.
>

Here you should mention whether you use the closed-source driver for the
discrete graphics card.
Ideally, a recent X.Org (and xrandr) should be OK.

>
> Once in this mode you have to find exactly the right sequence of
> spells to get it to do things right again. Often this means doing a total
> power down, including pulling the battery and shorting out the input pins
> to make sure no state is retained.
>
> The even worse case is the one that catches me out on a regular basis. I
> spend nearly as much time in a root virtual terminal as I do in a GUI.
> This has been my usual modus operandi for more years than most of you have
> been alive. Ain't gonna change and I nearly always forget that doing so
> arms a serious time bomb. If, as this evening, I walk of to the kitchen,
> get a cookie and something to drink, read an article in a magazine...
> when I come back the machine will have gone into a sleep state. If I
> were in the GUI, the sleep state would just mean I was in a screen saver.
> But if you are in the command line... it is death. You cannot get
> control back. The only choice is: kill the power.
>

"Root virtual terminal" is what we call the 'emergency console'
(Ctrl+Alt+F1)? When X.Org is not running?
This should not get stuck unless something goes really wrong on your
specific hardware.

>
> And that triggers a very bad situation. When you come back up and log
> in the GUI is screwed up royally. It has lost the second screen; it
> is confused about the resolution of either screen, any attempt to fix
> it causes a lock up... and to add insult to injury, it often has scrambled
> all the icons on your desktop, thinking it somehow knows better than you
> as to where you wanted them. It does not ask. It does not let yet say
> no. It just gives you the big one up the wazoo and says "See what I've
> done? Ha Ha!"
>
> Sometimes I can fix this through multiple cycles of total power down;
> sometimes I have been able to fix it by logggin in as root with Unity
> and using the terminal settings there to fix things ONE STEP AT A TIME.
> Turn off  "mirror" if it has set it; save the config. Then fix the
> resolution for the laptop screen. Save the config. Then set the resolution
> for the second screen and save it. Then log out as root, and if I am
> lucky, when I log back in as myself, my screens are correct. With my
> icons scrambled all over the frigging place, across the boundary
> between screens even, but at least I can work again.
>
> Total elapsed lost time to a typical incident? 1 to 2 hours to
> recover.
>
> I really am seriously annoyed and have been living with this since
> April 2012.
>
> This is not just one bug; I suspect there are quite a few getting
> tickled here and they are having a jolly good time at my expense.
>
> I now await the expected lecture, which I am not interested in, and
> perhaps, just perhaps, some kind soul who actually gives a damn about
> folk who have been using Linux for decades and expect certain things
> out of it.
>
>
What you are describing are issues specific with your hardware.
Here you need to provide detailed technical details, and the easiest way to
do so, is run

ubuntu-bug xorg

which will give you the opportunity to upload technical details to
launchpad.net and assign a bug report number.
Then you can send the URL to the bug report here so that we can have a
look.
These hardware issues are specific to the individual hardware that each one
of us have in their possession.
I have such a set up myself, but I do not get what you describe. Thus, your
hardware is different from mine (I also am running 13.10-development), and
that's most probably the culprit.

Simos
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