[ubuntu-us-ma] "Video Killed the Radio Star..."

jimi o'beirne jimobeirne at gmail.com
Wed May 6 16:39:34 BST 2009


Little piece of trivia- that song was th first video ever played on
MTV....


On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 10:33 -0400, Doc Kinne wrote:

> Hi Guys:
> 
> 
> 
> Boy, that subject line really dates me, doesn't it?  :-)
> 
> 
> I have to say that 9.04 is batting 0 for me at this point. I tried to
> upgrade my Xubuntu installation on my Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop and it
> would not boot up. Mike rolled his eyes at an "upgrade," and there is
> part of me that understands that. I re-installed 8.10 on it and its
> working as well as it ever did with Xubuntu. My next step there will
> be to install 9.04 and see if that makes a difference.
> 
> 
> But that's a back-burner project to be honest. This particular email
> is about Ubuntu 9.04 on a desktop.
> 
> 
> The desktop is an HP Vectra 550MHz PIII, 0.5GB RAM, an onboard VGA
> video port. It was, until last night, blissfully running Fedora 10. I
> decided to try to but Ubuntu 9.04 on it.
> 
> 
> The install seemed to go as I expected it to with no problems.
> However, when the machine rebooted the video no longer worked.
> 
> 
> The machine would boot up and give the "Ubuntu" logo with the "moving
> underline" indicating boot up progress. 90% the way through that line
> the monitor would ker-chunk as it tried to move to a different
> resolution (at least I think thats what its doing. It sounds like
> there are some heavy relays moving, and moving those relays is usual
> behavior for this particular Envision monitor). What gdm was doing was
> trying to find a resolution and scan rate that made sense to it. It
> would never find it and it would finally give up and throw up a dialog
> box saying that Ubuntu was in "Low Graphics Mode" and offer ways to
> debug the situation.
> 
> 
> Going into console mode I checked /etc/X11/xorg.conf and found it
> either empty or having nothing of substance in it. Looking at the logs
> is how I found out that gdm was unsuccessfully trying to find a proper
> resolution and scan rate.
> 
> 
> • I tried running "xrandr" but it consistently said it could not open
> the display.
> 
> 
> • I tried reinstalling gdm. It would reinstall with no problem. The
> only question regarding the display it would ask me would be if I
> wanted to use the frame rate buffer or not. I tried both "yes" and
> "no" with no effect.
> 
> 
> • I tried dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg, but that just seemed
> to give me a xorg.conf with basically empty entries in it.
> 
> 
> • At one point, when I had killed the gdm process I just invoked
> "startx" from the console. And it came up! I thought I was getting
> somewhere. I went to the Display control panel and it said the monitor
> resolution was 800x600 with a 60Hz signal. OK, it wasn't the 1024x768
> that I was used to, but it worked. I applied the changes, and it
> seemed to take it. However upon rebooting the display no longer
> worked.
> 
> 
> • I tried hand editing xorg.conf putting in a display resolution of
> 800x600 and a driver of vesa (since in the logs it looked like it was
> trying to use that driver), but that didn't work either.
> 
> 
> Any thoughts from you guys? I'm stumped at this point. I've not had a
> problem like this since the late 90s. It really confuses me that gdm
> cannot find a good resolution, but startx tries twice and does it. But
> I can't get those parameters to stick via the Display Control Panel.
> 
> 
> The only thing *I* can think of right now is to try to install 8.04 or
> 8.10 and see if I have better luck there.
> 
> ---
> 
> Richard "Doc" Kinne • Rikardo «Dokĉjo» KINNE, BA, MSc., AMAAS
> 
> <kinnerc @ gmail.com> 
> 
> "I'm the Doctor, and you're in the biggest library in the universe.
> Look me up!"
> 
> - The Doctor
> 
> 
> "Forests of the Dead," Doctor Who
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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