startx fails with vesa, ati on T41 with Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]

[Cristóbal M. Palmer]

Binary package hint: xorg

This is on a freshly-updated gutsy install.

After pulling updates this morning (notably xserver-xorg-core) I shut down to come to work. At work the T41 booted to a black screen. I found bug #132716 but I don't think I have the same problem since X will not start with vesa.

I stopped gdm with 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop' and then, as root, 'startx', which failed. I consulted /var/log/Xorg.0.log and noted that it ended with the line "Backtrace:" so I tried this:

root@kant:~# startx 2>&1 |tee /root/startx_log.txt

which includes at the end:

Backtrace:
Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 260: dl_open_worker: Assertion `_dl_debug_initialize (0, args->nsid)->r_state == RT_CONSISTENT' failed!
XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"

      after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

I've tried ati, fglrx and vesa drivers. All fail. I tried removing xorg.conf entirely, which then defaults to ati and fails as above. I'd love to supply more info if somebody can tell me where to start. I'll attach as much info as I can.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

It seems that your hard-drive is failing.. can you see error messages on the 'dmesg' output?

[Cristóbal M. Palmer (cristobalpalmer)]

Timo,

I'm not seeing any warnings or failures, no. sda1 (boot), sda3 (/) and sda4 (/home) are mounting cleanly. xfs_check didn't show any problems... I installed smartmontools anyway, and it's currently running 'smartctl -t long /dev/sda' ... I'll post back with output if it is indeed failing.

What are you looking for in that, anyway? I fail to see how that would be related to the Xorg failure. I updated xserver-xorg-core yesterday in the morning and now X won't start.... I'm hoping somebody can help me confirm that it's an X problem and not a configuration problem.

Let me know what other information I can provide to be helpful here. For example, if there is anything in particular from dmesg that you'd like me to attach, a driver or config you'd like me to try, etc.

Thanks,
CMP

[Cristóbal M. Palmer (cristobalpalmer)]

Hard drive is old but not in its death throes. See attached output of 'smartctl -a /dev/sda'. Again, I don't really think this is relevant.

[Cristóbal M. Palmer (cristobalpalmer)]

I'm about to reinstall with the latest daily alternate iso to see if
the problem persists from a clean install. I'd appreciate any
feedback.

Thanks,
CMP

[Cristóbal M. Palmer (cristobalpalmer)]

Reinstall with latest daily iso fixes the problem.

Apologies for the noise. :(

I'll do a better job of confirming and reproducing before filing any more bugs.

Cheers,
CMP