Hardy live cd displays strange things with geforce 7900 & acer AL1916W screen

[Adam Niedling]

Binary package hint: xorg

I have nvidia geforce 7900 and an acer AL1916W widescreen monitor. Its native resolution is 1440*900.
I get strange colors all over my screen when I run Hardy Alpha 5 Live CD. See attached picture.
Ubuntu 7.04 Live and before that doesn't even show anything on my screen, my monitor says unsupported resolution.
However, it works in safe mode.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Please attach your Xorg.0.log.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

How could I attach it when my screen is messed up? Even when I press ctrl+alt+backspace it remains that way.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Good point. Can you change the virtual console (ctrl-alt-f1), and copy the logfile on another system?

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Yes, I was able to get that file blindly! Here it is:

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Bug still present in Hardy Beta Live CD.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Please try the package from my ppa when it's built:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tjaalton/ubuntu hardy main

and if that's not enough, try setting 'Option "HWCursor" "false"' in the Driver-section of xorg.conf.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

As I mentioned earlier, the live cd can boot using safe mode. And after enabling the restricted vga card driver everything is fine.

I'd like Ubuntu live cd to boot up in normal mode too. So modifying to xorg.conf is not an option. Also I don't what to do with you ppa. What is ppa anyway? :)

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Safe mode means that it's using the vesa driver, which should always work. Do you have hardy installed? You could at least test the HWCursor option with it, and if you are using the proprietary driver make sure to comment out the line that says 'Driver "nvidia"' (ie. add '#' to the beginning of the line), and run some commands to restart X:

/etc/init.d/gdm stop
rmmod nvidia
/etc/init.d/gdm start

There are several bugs upstream about corrupt graphics, and disabling the hwcursor seems to help in some cases. We could disable it by default but first we need some confirmation that it really helps our users.

The new package could help the resolution issue. PPA stands for "personal package archive", and you can just add that line to your /etc/apt/sources.list and run 'apt-get update; apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nv' to get my version of the package. You can then remove the repository from the sources.list.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

I've tried everything you said. I installed the nvidia driver from your repo, i modified xorg.conf as you told, but every time i run "/etc/init.d/gdm start" my screen says "unsupported resolution". :(

What's next?

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Bug still occurs in Hardy final.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Still happens with Intrepid alpha 4.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for being persistent with this bug.

I've gone ahead and forwarded this bug upstream to http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17962. Could you please subscribe to this bug, in case upstream wishes further info or needs you to test something? Thanks ahead of time.

Also, am I understanding correctly, that without the HWCursor option Timo mentioned, you see the colored corruption in the http://launchpadlibrarian.net/12261714/bug.jpg photo, but with that option you instead see an "unsupported resolution"? I know neither situation seems ideal, but the fact that the behavior changes could be a strong clue.

Could you re-test against intrepid-beta to verify the issue still exists and attach an Xorg.0.log from that try (I'm guessing the problem is still there, but upstream will probably wish to test against the latest code)?

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Hi,

Thanks for working on this bug.

I retested it and the result is the same. However after pressing ctrl-alt-f1 the screen was fine so it was easy to get the log file. I'm attaching it.

Bad news that Intrepid beta Live gives me the same corrupted screen even in safe graphics mode.

I can't play around with xorg.conf now because my intrepid installation is a disaster now. Network manager is a nightmare, jockey can't install the nvidia driver and after the latest upgrade even my mouse doesn't work.

I will subscribe to the upstream bug.

[Markus Golser (golserma)]

Do you still have this isses?

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

I don't try every daily release. Look at my last comment with Intrepid beta Live. I get corrupted screen even in safe mode.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Works perfectly with Intrepid.