Mate no longer supporting graphics chipsets?
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu MATE |
Invalid
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
A friend in another state had been using Mate 16.04 on an old computer. Something had happened and the Software Boutique and the Welcome screen were no longer working. They were just blank white windows.
I visited him last week and we experimented. A fresh install of 18.04.1 from DVD had the same problem. A fresh install of 16.04 from DVD (might have been the .1 or .2 version - but definitely an early one) worked fine. When the Software Updater brought 16.04 up to date, the problem returned. Boutique and Welcome were both blank windows.
I have several of the same old motherboard (Biostar K8M800 micro AM2) available, so I experimented when I got home. Using the on-board graphics (VIA S3 Unichrome), an installation of 18.04.1 worked slowly (only 64 MB of video memory) but properly.
I powered down the computer and installed a graphics card - an Nvidia FX 5200 (AGP 8x). The Welcome screen was dark except for the single bar at the top asking me to help improve Ubuntu Mate. (The rest of that screen would have been asking me to send telemetry info. None of that displayed. The entire window was dark except for the top line. The Software Boutique is also just a dark window.
I emailed my friend asking him what graphics card was in his machine. It's a Radeon 9200SE. So the problem is there with multiple older graphics chipsets. One of ours was ATI, one Nvidia, both AGP-based.
On his machine, we also ran into a second (possibly related) issue. When we tried changing the panel to Traditional, the menu bar at the top and the area across the bottom were both blank. No menu, and no way to launch anything or change back to some other panel layout. We gave up on Mate and installed Xubuntu instead, which worked perfectly. Whatever the issues are, they appear to be Mate-specific and recent - before updates, 16.04 does not have those problems.
| uzi3k (uzi3k) wrote | #1 |
| tags: | added: xenial |
| Changed in ubuntu-mate: | |
| status: | New → Invalid |
when software boutique gets to 'stocking software boutique' it hangs and then goes blank. I'm on intel pentium 3ghz. No gpu as far as I am aware. welcome screen loads normally. Fresh install of ubuntu mate 18.04 32 bit