X won't start on boot of Dapper Final, Live CD or installed system

[JohnCollaros]

Downloaded the lastest Dapper Flight 5 CD from ubuntu CD images site.

Live CD booted ok, but when GDM tries to start, it fails.

I'll attach the X.org log.

lspci output (from my running Breezy system)
jcollaros@titan:~$ lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 925X Memory Controller Hub (rev 04)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 925X PCI Express Root Port (rev 04)
0000:00:1b.0 0403: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev d3)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FR (ICH6/ICH6R) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801FR/FRW (ICH6R/ICH6RW) SATA Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5e4b
0000:01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5e6b
0000:02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 01)
0000:03:0a.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80)

I have an ASUS X700 Pro video card.
Running on a Shuttle SB95P
Intel 3.4GHz CPU
1Gb RAM

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Here is the log file showing the failure to detect ATI X700 video card

[Jérémie Corbier (jcorbier)]

Could you attach your Xorg.conf too, please?

[Jerome S. Gotangco (jsgotangco)]

Does it still occur in Flight 6? Please include both error log and conf if it does.

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Ok. I downloaded Dapper Flight 6, and I still cant get X started.

I'll attach as much info as I can here.

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Here is my lspci output after getting a shell from flight 6

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Here is my dmesg output from Flight 6

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Here is my gdm.log from flight 6

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Here is my xorg.conf from flight 6

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Here is my Xorg.log file from flight 6

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Here is my syslog file from flight 6

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Here is my messages file from flight 6

[Jerome S. Gotangco (jsgotangco)]

looking at the log file, i couldn't see anything wrong with detecting your card model (it actually installed the appropriate driver) but it ended up not seeing your card physically. I'm pretty stumped at this, Fabio, Adam?

[JohnCollaros (timefantom)]

Any news on this guys?

[seanh (seanh)]

I also had X fail to start with dapper flight live CDs, and after installing dapper freshly from a release CD (on the release CD live session, x started fine) I now have problems with x starting in the installed system. Sometimes it starts, but most of the time it freezes on a blank screen.

[Jerome S. Gotangco (jsgotangco)]

John: Does it still happen on a fresh dapper release CD?

chombee: if you can, please attach Xorg.0.log and your xorg.conf

Best,

--
Jerome Gotangco
<email address hidden>
Mobile: [phone]
GPG: 0x9E379FC6

[seanh (seanh)]

My Xorg.0.log, as requested.

[seanh (seanh)]

I also found this Xorg.0.log.old from a previous boot earlier this morning (judging by the modification date), and thought it might be useful.

[seanh (seanh)]

My xorg.conf from /etc/X11

Also, you can find the output of lshw for the laptop in question here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SeanHammond?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=taptaplshw.html

It's an IBM Thinkpad T21.

[seanh (seanh)]

Okay, uploaded the files that were requested of me. I had to boot a dapper live CD (received in the post today, along with stickers, neat!) in order to get these, and the live CD froze on starting X also, but succeeded on (I think) the second attempt to boot.

Thanks for helping.

More info about the bug as I'm experiencing it:

* At a point late in the ubuntu boot process you're on a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left, this occurs briefly before GDM appearing. When the boot fails, it freezes at this black screen, and the cursor stops blinking. There's nothing I can do except kill the machine with the power switch (this can't be good for my old laptop).

* The bug doesn't seem to be specific to any flight of dapper or to the live system or installed system - I've experienced it quite reliably with a couple of dapper flights and with the dapper release, and with live sessions and installed sessions.

* It doesn't seem to make any difference which kernel I boot from (I have two ubuntu kernels installed, don't have the exact versions sorry, plus rescue modes for each). If I boot into rescue mode I'm taken to the root prompt fine, but the bug will occur when I run startx.

* The bug seems to be intermittent. If I just keep booting it, sometimes GDM will load and all will be fine, but most of the time it'll freeze. There doesn't seem to be any particular condition that makes it fail or succeed.

* I've used this laptop with release and pre-release versions of every release of ubuntu, and never noticed this problem until dapper, so it seems to be something new.

Thanks!

[seanh (seanh)]

We should probably try to figure out if the two of us are experiencing the same or different bugs. Also we should probably change the title of this bug, since I think it applies to the dapper release.

[seanh (seanh)]

Any help on this? I'm starting to get desperate. It takes 5-10 attempts each time I want to boot my laptop, and on each failure I have to kill it with the power switch.

Might it be worthwhile doing a re-install, in case the CD I used was bad (seems a bit unlikely since I've seen the same problem with a number of different Live CDs, but with this particular install I seem to have gotten a really chronic instance of the problem)?

Is there anything I can do myself to debug this problem?

[seanh (seanh)]

Another thing I've noticed about this is that once I get the laptop to boot successfully, I can then restart ubuntu (without turning off the machine) as many times as I want and it will always boot successfully. Once the laptop gets shutdown, the problem with booting returns.

[seanh (seanh)]

I just received an update of xserver-xorg-core today on a different machine. It says the upgrade closes this bug: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-driver-i810/+bug/48113

which sounds similar to my bug. Except that bug says that you can switch to other virtual consoles while X is blank, which I can't do.

I've downgraded the laptop with the problem to Breezy so unfortunately I can't test it, though I may be willing to upgrade and find out, if there's some reason to believe it might be fixed.

The closed bug says it is with i830m video chips, do you know how I can check if I have that chip?

[seanh (seanh)]

Hmm... I don't find the string "i810" anywhere in my xorg.conf like the guy in bug #48113 had. I've got driver "savage" as my video device, "S3 Inc. 86C270-294 Savage/IX-MV". Not too hopeful it is the same bug.

[seanh (seanh)]

Okay, I think the problem I'm experiencing is definitely a duplicate of this bug:

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-driver-savage/+bug/33617

I don't know if the same is true for the problem that JohnCollaros was describing, in this same bug report (we may have two similar bugs mixed into one report here). Anyway, I'm moving over to #33617.

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

The persitent "Mach64 detected" stuff is in the original log file, thus marking duplicate of bug #28925.