boot fails after changing graphics card
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| xorg-server (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
When I installed Ubuntu my system had an ATI graphics card. Once I got to the desktop I used "System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers" to install a driver for it. Later I wanted to use an Intel graphics card, so I disabled the ATI card from bios and enabled the Intel card instead. When booting up the computer again it failed and got stuck in a text console. I had no idea, why and I was worried that my Intel card was broken, as one of my friends had got the card working without any problems.
About a year later I read that the Intel card would support kernel mode setting, so I gave it another try, but it was still broken. After spending quite some time asking about the problem in various places I finally found out that I should remove some packages related to the ATI card. I think it was removing xorg-driver-fglrx package that finally fixed the problem and I was able to use my Intel card.
By filing this bug I'm not hoping for a system that would revolutionize the graphics card infrastructure of the whole Linux eco system or what ever, but could you please change the system to a slightly more understandable direction, so getting a new graphics card (that has been proven to work in Ubuntu!) to work in Ubuntu would take a one day, instead of a year. Maybe you could put a notification on first boot with the new card "For your new graphics card to work we have to remove some stuff related to your old card. Sorry for the inconvenience. Press ok to continue." Or something along those lines.
| Bryce Harrington (bryce) wrote | #1 |
Yeah, the X driver system in debian/ubuntu for proprietary drivers was designed with an assumption that the system has just one video device. So it did not cope well with swapping to other drivers or changing hardware out from underneath or whatnot.
This has become particularly a problem on the newer hybrid computers that include multiple graphics cards and hardware or bios toggles to swap between them, but it's a deep design issue that requires rearchitecting the whole system in order to fix.
For Lucid we have undertaken this rearchitecture work. It is difficult and fairly risky that we might end up just breaking things in other different ways but if we can make it work then hopefully it will solve this whole problem.
Anyway, since i think that rework will address this request, I'll dupe this to the master bug for that work. Your help doing thorough testing of this in Lucid would be valuable. See http://