Edgy can't initialize display with Matrox G400 card

[bjoh]

On my box, neither the Edgy Beta LiveCD nor the alternate install can start X. When trying to start gdm, the mode is switched a few times, then some garbage is displayed on the screen, then it goes dark. My display's (Eizo F520) OSD shows that it is driven with 23.1 kHz horizontal and 21.6 Hz vertical frequency.

The messages in X.org.log don't tell me much, other than it seems to have troubles finding the right mode.

A Dapper install on the same machine works fine; I copied the X11 config directory over to Edgy, but that didn't help.

***

Also affects Edgy final release (ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso) so description updated 27 Oct 2006. -- Norman Petry.

[Martin Bergner (martin-bergner)]

Hi, can you append the Xorg.0.log to this bug?

[bjoh (jb-5pm)]

Sorry, thought I had appended it, but that apparently didn't work.

[Felix Miata (mrmazda)]

I just updated edgy today, then swapped an ATI card out and a G400 in. I can get up to 1400x1050x16bit@60Hz, but that's not an acceptable substitute for someone used to 2048x1536 with that same card on SUSE 10.0. If I set xorg.conf to use more than 1400x1050, the display goes into sleep mode. The workaround in https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-mga/+bug/58721/comments/5 does not work for me.

[bjoh (jb-5pm)]

This seems to be a bug in version 1.4.1 of the mga driver. As this is only a test install, I forced edgy to install "xserver-xorg-video-mga 1.4.2-dfsg" from Debian unstable, and it worked flawlessly afterwards. Of course, I also hosed my package db, so this can not be considered a fix.

So, I propose a solution: Update xserver-xorg-video-mga to 1.4.2 in Edgy - or, if it is too late for that, issue an updated package immediately after the release.

[Norman Petry (npetry)]

I can confirm that this bug also applies to the Edgy final release. I tried booting: "ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso" on my system this morning (downloaded yesterday), and observed nothing but a blank screen, followed eventually by a "Sync. out of Range" message from my monitor.

 Judging by the CD-ROM drive activity, the system was booting to completion, but without any display it is of course completely unusable. This seems like a very serious regression from Dapper (and earlier versions of Ubuntu) which had no problems with detecting and properly configuring my hardware:

- Matrox G400 32MB Dual-Head Display Adapter
- Samsung SyncMaster 763MB Monitor(s)
- Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Motherboard / VIA KT400 Chipset
- Athlon XP 1900 CPU

I attempted to boot the system multiple times, both normally and in "Safe Mode" with the same results. I also tried modifying the F4 display option to different values. With 800 x 600 32-bit resolution (and perhaps others) rather than "VGA", I am able to see the Ubuntu logo with the activity scrollbar for a while, until it attempts to start X and I get the same blank screen/sync out of range result.

I suspect that #58721 is a dup of this bug (or vice-versa).

[Andrew Ash (ash211)]

This bug does seem to be a dup of bug 58721. I'm marking as such.