Comment 0 for bug 519891
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| Tom Louwrier (tom-louwrier) wrote Lucid breaks every other day; no gui and no tty (ATI 200M) | #0 |
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bbfa235
(Get the code!)
Hi
Running Lucid Alpha AMD64 on a Dell 131L laptop with ATI 200M video card. Updates loaded once a day.
In the last 2 weeks+ the system breaks every other day, seemingly to do with changes to the video driver or associated changes to the kernel.
After the very first text based messages when booting the screen turns black, then I get all sorts of fine coloured vertical lines and that's about it. I can hear the rest of the booting process carrying on and see the wifi-light come up. Without gui, that still leaves me with an unusable system.
Shifting to tty with ctrl-alt-F1 etc does not help, because that gives me just another pattern of coloured bars.
First time this happened I had to wait a day and then reinstall from an alternative-daily CD.
That seemed to fix it. Fair enough, an update that hickupped.
However, since then this problem returns about every 2 days. Sometimes I can get around it by adding 'nomodeset' or 'radeon.modeset=0' to the boot line in grub. Other times it will only boot with this option removed.
Removing 'splash quiet' from the boot line makes no difference.
With the option 'nomodeset' I have also seen the screen with just the left hand half in use (right half blacked out) and 2 mouse cursors about 1/2 screen apart vertically. The left half of the screen is completely garbled but for the 2 cursors.
I have not seen any real pattern in which update to what packet seems to trigger of fix this issue. Xserver was there at one time, but also plymouth or nothing very much related to the gui or video subsystem at all (I think). Sometimes I find that the problem returns after a reboot, without any updates having been installed at all since the last boot.
Could this have to do with a race condition somewhere, making this problem intermittent and not easily reproduced?
Usually I wait for 24 hours and try to boot into rescue mode so I can update whatever has been released and *hope* for my system to get accessible again.
Of course I am quite aware that this is an alpha release, but this is getting really annoying. Also it keep driving me to use XP again (ugh!) and we don't want that, do we?
If I can do anything to give you more information about this issue, please ask.
regards
Tom