Old SiS video needs v86d for Lucid Plymouth

[yeti]

The bug I was having with Lucid is best described at http://idyllictux.wordpress.com/
A black screen persists for most of boot-up, showing no progress; then an ugly blast of colored lines followed by a Plymouth screen for a second or two before going to a login screen. What's expected
is to see the Plymouth screen and a progression of dots as things proceed.

My elderly laptop has the following video:
lspci | grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760 PCI/AGP or 662/761Gx PCIE VGA Display Adapter

My kernel is as follows:
cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.32-22-generic (buildd@rothera) (gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) ) #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 28 13:27:30 UTC 2010

I had earlier solved a different Plymouth problem, a nasty hangup at fsck, by upgrading mountall, which now is:
mountall --version
mountall 2.15
Copyright (C) 2010 Canonical Ltd.

The blackscreen at the first part of Plymouth was finally solved simply by using synaptic to install the v86d package. No other tweaks were necessary to get past the black screen phenomenon and see the progression of dots as things proceed. This may have brought boot-up down to 56 seconds from 60 as well. Incidentally, the synaptic install does its own initramfs revision to incorporate v86d. In my case I don't get vesafb or uvesafb, but at least the black screen is gone.

[Christoph Korn (c-korn)]

Not related to getdeb at all.

[yeti (utu)]

v86d does solve this problem;
however, adding sisfb to /etc/modules does just as well.

The splash screen does have an imperfection as shown in bun 521018,
but it's not as objectionable as 30 seconds of black screen.

[yeti (utu)]

This is probably another way to look at bug #530554.
I agree with bug #530554 note 2.
Lucid installer may (or must) not recognize SiS video needs sisfb.
I don't remember this being a problem for me in Ubuntu 9.10, or say before Plymouth.

[yeti (utu)]

http://en-gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Framebuffer helps sort out
what to expect with SiS, and how to set things right.

With Lucid I get my best performance by adding the following:

'video=sisfb:mode:1024x768x32,rate:70,mem:4096'

between 'ro' and 'quiet splash' in the grub menu entry.
Leave off the quote marks, be precise with punctuation.

Hope that works for others.

[yeti (utu)]

Like I said, be precise with punctuation,
That's http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Framebuffer

[kurt belgrave (trinikrono)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage . I have classified this bug as a bug in xserver-xorg-video-sis.
(With many applications, you can report a future bug directly on the appropriate package by opening the application's "Help" menu and choosing "Report a Problem". https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs)

[helpfulboy02 (helpfulboy02)]

will the updated fix be Back ported to 12.10?
or Earlier?
It is an important bug

[Mörgæs (moergaes)]

Closing due to age.

If a similar bug appears in Lubuntu 14.04, which contains an important fix for SIS cards, please open a new report.