Vaio PCG-SRX51P/B has two graphics problems

[Russel Winder]

When booting Edgy, the bootloader splash screen is not the Ubuntu name and the progress bar but a bunch of flashing blocks. Ditto the closedown splash screen. As far as I can tell it is only a problem for the program that does the screen, Ubuntu seems to actually boot and run fine.

Except that if the background of the panel is made transparent then there are lots of nastry horrible lines behind the transparent icons on the panel. The problem doesn't seem to affect any other aspect of the graphics system just the transparent panel backgrounds. But it looks awfully ugly.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

I probably ought to report that there is still a problem with Feisty -- there is no longer the nasty flashing but just a black screen. I have removed quiet and splash from the boot options as the only sane solution to the problem. It doens't look nice when booting but it is very effective.

I wonder if this bug has been incorrectly assigned to util-linux? Isn't this a grub issue?

[Wousser (wousser)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Hardy Heron. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at [WWW] http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Because this bug did not have activity during a long period, I set the status to invalid however if you can still reproduce this issue with latest ubuntu release and that you can provide needed informations, you can set back the status of the bug to "new" and/or comment about this. Thanks for your contribution.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

We are now at Gutsy but very soon Hardy. I think it would be best to wait till after the upgrade to Hardy to try the experiment to determine if there is still a problem.

Currently with Gutsy, I have the splash screen switched off, so I have no data about the flashing. As with Feisty, the screen is totally black (i.e. no listing of what is happening) until gdm kicks in and X starts, so there is something of a problem. However, it is probably only worth worrying about if it still happend on Hardy. I expect it to, but until I have real data. . .

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Thanks, so we will wait for your confirmation with Hardy :)

[Russel Winder (russel)]

Hardy boots fine, but the splash screen never shows. If I boot without splash everything goes as expected, with splash I just get a blank screen during the boot. So all the irritation during boot has gone but . . . so has the Ubuntu logo.

In other news, it seems that there are no problems with the icons on the panel if the panel is made totally transparent. Excellent :-)

I wonder if I should try switching from the i810 driver to the intel driver?

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Thank you for your confirmation. Can you compare the content of your /etc/usplash.conf file and the actual resolution of your screen? The resolution of your screen is shown under System / Preferences / Screen Resolution. If you have a different value in /etc/usplash.conf, can you change it to be the same as the resolution of your screen and tell if it fixed usplash?

Also if you have a intel graphic card, can you take a look at the suggested workaround in the description of bug 68012?

[Russel Winder (russel)]

/etc/usplash.conf has the right values:

|> more /etc/usplash.conf
# Usplash configuration file
xres=1024
yres=768
|>

There seems to be a number of options in Bug 68012. I tried adding vga=773 to the boot line but this just put me into a "which video mode" dialogue.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Russel Winder : Did you look at the workaround in the bug description? "In the BIOS setup in the menu "Intergrated Devices (LegacySelect Options)" increase "Onboard Video Buffer" from 1 MB to 8 MB.". If you have such option in your BIOS, it would be very interesting that you try it to see if it solves your issue.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

Unfortunately, there is a fundamental problem: there is no such menu item in the BIOS menus :-(

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Thanks for your fast answers. Since you don't seem to have a Dell computer, the menu in your BIOS might not exist or have another name. Ex. "Onboard Video Buffer" could be "Video memory", you can look if you find an option in your BIOS that you can swith from 1Mb to 8Mb. Be careful when changing options in BIOS because it has an important impact on your computer.

Can you also attach the files created by these commands in a terminal?

sudo lspci -vvnn > lspci-vvnn.txt
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst > menu.lst
uname -a > uname.txt

[Russel Winder (russel)]

The title of this bug report "Vaio PCG-SRX51P/B has two graphics problems" does rather give the game away that this is not a Dell machine ;-)

The BIOS on this SRX51P/B is very limited in options, there is nothing I can see about video memory buffers. As it is a laptop, this doesn't surprise me as the hardware is all fixed and known at laptop construction time.

Three messages coming up one for each file -- I wonder when Lauchpad will allow multiple files per message?

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Oh right, a Vaio, obviously :) . According to your attached files, your computer does not use any special options that might cause problems and you have a Intel Corporation 82815 Chipset Graphics Controller graphic card which is definitively known to have problems with usplash. Since this is for sure a duplicate of bug 68012, I mark it as such. Grouping these duplicates will help developers to identify and work on this issue. Thanks a lot for the time you invested to improve ubuntu!

[Russel Winder (russel)]

Grouping duplicates is clearly the right thing to do. In a sense I am pleased that the usplash issue is a known problem and that it is wider than just this make of machine. Clearly it would be better if it wasn't a problem at all, but as it has no actual consequences for the use of the machine then for me it is not really a crucial issue.

I assume that any future comments should happen against Bug 68012.

The second problem noted in the initial report has gone away now, which is great, thanks to however fixed it!

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

>>I assume that any future comments should happen against Bug 68012.

Exactly, however since bug 68012 already contains enough information, we try to keep it short to help developers. I think that they have everything they need to consider the issue now. Thanks again for your participation.