screen goes into power save during boot

[Hamish Downer]

Binary package hint: usplash

During boot, my screen cycles through

* power save mode for a few seconds,
* on for less than a second, showing a glimpse of the boot/usplash display
* blank, and back to the start again

Once gdm is reached, the screen works fine. Login, use gnome - no problem.

This happened when I upgraded from breezy to dapper, and also when trying the live CD. (I've reinstalled breezy now due to this and wifi problems).

The video card is an ATI Radeon 8500. lspci -v output is

 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R200 QL [Radeon 8500 LE] (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 8500
        Flags: bus master, stepping, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 16
        Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
        I/O ports at b800 [size=256]
        Memory at dfcf0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Expansion ROM at dfcc0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [58] AGP version 2.0
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

[Hamish Downer (mishd)]

Actually this may be related to bug #27837

So relevant links might include

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/usplash/+bug/27837
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/USplashCustomizationHowto
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/USplashCustomizationHowtoDiscussion

[Clemens (clast)]

confirmed with the newest usplash (0.4-9) in edgy.

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

I believe this is not related to bug 27837. There are two problems. One seems to show up in dapper, another is showing up in edgy. The dapper problem is that linux requires a boot option to set the resolution for usplash to work under some configurations. The edgy problem is that /etc/usplash.conf is sometimes generated with incorrect values for the card/monitor configuration.

The solution to the edgy problem seems to be to modify /etc/usplash.conf and set xres to 1024 and yres to 768.

I added a number of comments to bug 64487, but I think this should be the canonical report for the edgy problem, so I'm going to mark a bunch of dupes directly.

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

Duh. I have reading comprehension problems, apparently, since this bug was originally reported on dapper.