Critical/highly severe bug in Gutsy, noone seems to notice

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 09:29:51PM +0200, Thomas Novin wrote:
> I'm a bit worried about a problem that seems to exist in the VESA driver
> that ships with Gutsy. I was about to file a bug on launchpad but found
> there were already several similar issues. 4 of them with status
> New/Undecided and one with Confirmed/High but none of them are assigned
> to a specific person/group.
> 
> To describe the problem quickly; If you have a ATI X???? graphics card
> which seems to be popular on laptops, Xorg won't start thus making a
> normal install impossible.
> 
> Launchpad URLs:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/122663
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/131799
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/119465
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/103945
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-driver-vesa/+bug/126008
> 
> Is this the right forum to attempt to get some attention? It is approx.
> one month left to the Gutsy beta so I recon that something needs to be
> done pretty quickly.

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for highlighting this, and for pointing out the dupes.  You're
right that this is critical - in fact this is a situation bulletproof-x
won't be able to handle presently (since it depends on using vesa).
(I've been working to try and get bpx to fall back to vga or framebuffer
when vesa fails, but so far without success, so getting a fix for the
root cause of this bug is indeed critical.)

After tribe-4 was released, we updated the -ati driver to the latest
6.6.193 version.  Would you mind doublechecking if the issue still
exists, by booting a daily ISO?  These can be found here:

  http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ 

We're aware that this new version is far from perfect, but it fixes a
wide swath of issues and has better support for newer devices.  I'm
curious if with this new driver, if the installer will choose to use
this rather than the broken vesa driver for X??? cards.

If it does not fix it, there's a few approaches we could take to work
around the issue.  Let's continue this discussion on bug 103945 to find
a satisfactory solution.

Bryce