[intrepid] intel 965 not recognised by LiveCD/installer

[darylb]

Binary package hint: xorg

Using the Intrepid Alpha 4 LiveCD on my Vaio VGN-SZ71WN, the display comes up black at GDM stage. Ctrl-Alt-F1 causes some flickering of the backlight, but no prompt comes up, the screen remains black.

Using the "safe graphics" mode of the LiveCD allowed me see the screen (although the resolution was recognised by VESA as 1024x600 instead of 1280x800). I than installed to disk and installed all updates.

However still now when booting from the hard disk I am getting the same small resolution in the middle of the screen and its using the VESA driver rather than the intel one. Attempting to switch xorg.conf from "vesa" to "intel" didn't help either.

I then noticed some settings on the grub kernel line:
title Ubuntu intrepid (development branch), kernel 2.6.26-5-generic
root (hd0,8)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-5-generic root=UUID=34dd755c-709a-4ee3-a4a5-f2e2f30d6587 ro xforcevesa quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-5-generic
quiet

Most notably "xforcevesa". Is this put in place purely because the LiveCD was booted in safe graphics mode? This "xforcevesa" setting is also found on the "# kopt=" line.

Removing "xforcevesa quiet splash" from the end of the boot line in grub allowed me to boot up and correctly use the intel driver.

So the driver works, but Xorg seems unable to detect and configure it correctly.

$ apt-cache policy xorg
xorg:
  Installed: 1:7.4~1ubuntu1

[darylb (darylblanc)]

Here is the lspci output for my graphics chip:

# lspci | grep Display
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

(There are two chips in this series of Vaio's, chosen by a two position slider switch, the other is an Nvidia chip)

[darylb (darylblanc)]

This seems to be a somewhat intermittent problem. I rebooted the laptop a few times (with "xforcevesa quiet splash" still in menu.lst) and it worked once. However on reboot I got the black screen again and had to power it off.

It fails FAR more than it succeeds though (without changing the grub line).
This behaviour seems to be similar to #257819

[darylb (darylblanc)]

I have learned some new information. Removing only "xforcevesa" from the grub line still produces the failure case.

Removing just "splash" however seems to make it work, so this is possibly nothing to do with the xforcevesa option after all. Although I'm still not sure why that has been put there is there in the first place.

Note that this testing is with the driver manually changed from "vesa" to "intel" in the xorg.conf file. The installer hard coded "vesa" in there which is obviously still an issue.