It should be easier to change hardware.

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

I recently switched video cards in a desktop machine. When I booted up with the
new video card installed, Ubuntu (Hoary, as much of it as I can get at this
time) did not appear to see the new video card and make appropriate adjustments.
 Instead, I was left with an error screen indicating X could not start up and
then I was dropped off at a login prompt.

I imagine this would be quite a disaster for a novice using Ubuntu with hardware
other than the install-time hardware. I knew enough about Debian's system to
try using the reconfigure script ("dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg", if I recall
correctly) and even then I was presented with a lot of questions which should
have been autodetected--which driver to use, what my keyboard was (irrelevant
since I hadn't changed it), questions about my mouse (same, it remains
unchanged), and my monitor (unchanged as well). I'm no Debian expert, but I was
able to get myself to a working GUI, but I doubt that novices would ever get
this far.

By contrast, consider what happened under Fedora Core 2 and 3 on the same
machine: I was presented with a fairly non-technical description of what had
happened, and hit two keys (any key followed by F2) to get kudzu to "do the
right thing" with the config files (perhaps this could be improved by just doing
the reconfiguration instead of asking me about it). Kudzu figured out what
driver to use, and after I pressed F2, it set up things the right way all
without asking me any technical questions (it unconfigured the old video card
configuration and set up the new video card configuration). When the bootup was
completed, I was left in a familiar GUI (albeit at a very low resolution). I
ran the Display control panel, set up the new upper-bound resolution, logged
out, and logged back in.

Perhaps Ubuntu could use a program to check for changed hardware at boot time
and reconfig files appropriately?

[Daniel Stone (daniels)]

To be honest, I doubt that 'non-technical' users would change their video cards
on a whim. But I do see your point, and am thinking about hacking up gdm's
XKeepsCrashing wrapper to check if the video card is different than what we've
configured for.

[Daniel Stone (daniels)]

XORG_FORCE_PROBE=yes sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg, should do what
you want.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

It occurred to me that a rather nice way to deal with this problem would be to
have the gdm XKeepsCrashing script offer to re-probe, e.g.:

If you have added or removed components from your computer (such as installing a
new video card), I can attempt to reconfigure the system to use them. Would you
like to do this?

[Daniel Stone (daniels)]

*** Bug 12787 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Daniel Stone (daniels)]

*** Bug 12848 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Jay Camp (jayc)]

"To be honest, I doubt that 'non-technical' users would change their video cards
on a whim. But I do see your point, and am thinking about hacking up gdm's
XKeepsCrashing wrapper to check if the video card is different than what we've
configured for."

But when they do change it, everything comes to a crashing hault with no clear
sign of what to do. Also don't forget if they switch monitors the modes may not
be set right any more. I think that's the more likely usage scenario. Is there
anything preventing the wrapper from giving a more friendly explanation and
offering to reconfigure the video?

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

*** Bug 14035 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Daniel Stone (daniels)]

blah blah XorgAutoconfiguration blah blah

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

*** Bug 22527 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[rngadam (rngadam)]

Don't forget that you can be novice at Debian (even an expert at other Linux
might run into trouble) but a quite proficient user otherwise - especially now a
days where there is lots of hardcore gamers that keep upgrading their video
cards... Offering `dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg` is a neat stopgap solution but
this is an area that clearly needs work.

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

I'm closing this bug and suggest that we continue it throught the specification process (see: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+specs and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeatureSpecifications)

I'll just throw in my last 2 cents at the end ;) : It might be useful to have separate boot options in grub for 'Start normally' and 'I have installed new hardware', where the former could start up with minimal checking (potentially even faster than now) and the later would do a thorough scan.