Installer / partitioning messes up X display

[Nicolai Hähnle]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

Using: Kubuntu Feisty Herd 2 i386 Desktop (same thing happened with Herd 1)

Using normal boot of the CD (i.e. no special graphics configuration in the boot loader, just configuring German language and keyboard layout).

At several points in the installer that are related to partitions, scanning partitions and formatting partitions, it appears as if the X server gets confused: Sometimes, a black horizontal bar appears in the bottom third of the screen. At other times, the display gets completely disabled.

Reliably workaround: Switch to another virtual terminal and back to the X session (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F1, then Alt+F7). This recovers the X session completely.

I really don't know which component is the culprit - whether it's the installer, the X server, or something else. For good measure, I'm going to attach a number of logfiles and lspci output.

If you have an idea how I can help figure this out, please tell me!

FWIW, the rough hardware setup is:
- Athlon XP 2400+
- 1GB RAM
- ATI Radeon X800 Pro, 256 MB memory

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

Thanks for your report. Would you say that this could be a duplicate of #73955? It sounds like the corruption in your case happens at more different places.

[Nicolai Hähnle (nha)]

Looking at bug #73955 ... (this is on the installed Feisty now)

I can't test the reproduction sequence posted by Colin Watson on 2006-12-04 because I don't have that file.

However, the reproduction command posted by wiertel on 2007-01-06, entered in a konsole session:
$ /etc/init.d/console-setup restart
creates exactly the same kind of screen corruption as occured just before the partitioning step of the installer.

So while I'm not entirely certain, it's quite reasonable to assume that this bug is a duplicate.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Yep, pretty likely. I think I need another ubiquity upload to pick up the console-setup fix, but that will happen in the normal course of events and definitely before Herd 3.