blank screen at boot after upgrading to Natty from v10.10

[boblinux]

Hello,

I just upgraded to v11.04 from v10.10, and at boot, I only get a blank screen. It looks like an NVidia bug :
- I did not see any error in syslog, nor in Xorg.0.log, nor in kdm.log or in gdm.log
- reverting to the "nv" driver at least gives me a (ugly) display - previously, I was using the "nvidia" driver.
- nouveau did not seem able to drive my graphic card (I got a shell console, but no graphic)

My NVidia card is a GeForce 8600 GT on a Asus P5K motherboard (64-bits)

Any hints ? do you need additional informations ?

Regards
R. Grasso
Senior sysadmin

[boblinux (robert-grasso)]

I noticed, with the nvidia driver, that the X process (/usr/bin/X :0 etc) was NOT killable, even with kill -9 ! this was amazing ! I have been in the Unix/Linux world for 20 years now, and I only remember of non-killable processes in situations related to hardware failures.

I also regenerated my xorg.conf with nvidia-xconfig, but this did not change anything

[RedSingularity (redsingularity)]

Moving to the general xorg package. That team will move it to a better suited package if they feel necessary.

[boblinux (robert-grasso)]

I have a suggestion : I looked at the supported hardware on NVidia pages : for driver 195.36 (with Ubuntu 10.04) my graphic card 8600 GT was mentioned :

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-195.36.24.html

However, for driver 270.41 (Ubuntu 11.04), my card is NOT mentioned :

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-270.41.06-driver.html

card 8600 GTS is mentioned, but not mine.

Do you have any information about that ?

My NVidia chip is built on a Gygabyte card, I guess I will have to contact Gygabyte support in order to get the accurate confirmation, but this does not seem easy ...

[boblinux (robert-grasso)]

mmh, must be a typo; here

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/270.41.19/README/README.txt

the 8600 GT is mentioned

[boblinux (robert-grasso)]

I made some progress : actually, in my previous xorg.conf, I was loading the module "v4l" (I am not sure why I loaded it - must have been a test a long time ago) - as soon as I commented it, I got my display back !

Actually, I have an Hauppauge HVR-1300 TV card, which always had some troubles with recent kernels (but eventually worked); actually it works in normal TV mode, but as soon as I try to connect to the MPEG2 encoder, the software used (mplayer, kaffeine, whatever) just stalls and is not killable any more ! (as X did recently !).

I just saw here :

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-1300

that the driver was broken in a previous kernel version, and it has just been fixed - well, may be the fix is just partial - So I guess this issue is closed, and I am going to open another one about the Conexant driver ...

[penalvch (penalvch)]

boblinux, thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu. Natty reached EOL on October 28, 2012.
See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

If this is reproducible in a supported release, please file a new report.