ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala shows green dots and lines with indication of wrong frequency on monitor

[mrproper]

Binary package hint: xorg

I am using this 9.04 liveCD to report the problem. Please disregard the package info - use only hw info collected by ubuntu-bug.
When booting from 9.10 RC live CD Desktop x86 or amd64 or enter installation procedure the monitor first goes blank for a few seconds and then there are green dots and lines running through it and a monitor rectangle appears with shows resolution and update freq.
I have biostar a TF7025-M2 motherboard (T-series) with integrated GeForce 7025/NF630a Graphic Chipset.
Same thing with all previous beta releases of 9.10.
9.04 is doing just fine on the same hw.

Regards,
Dmitry

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386/amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
MediaBuild: Ubuntu 9.10 "Carmic Coala" - Release i386/amd64
Package: xorg 1:7.4~3ubuntu7
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersion: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic (gcc version 4.4.1 (Ubuntu 4.4.1-4ubuntu8) ) #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 16 14:04:26 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
SourcePackage: xorg
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic

[lspci]
00:00.0 RAM memory [0500]: nVidia Corporation MCP67 Memory Controller [10de:0547] (rev a2)
     Subsystem: Biostar Microtech Int'l Corp Device [1565:3409]
00:12.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7025 [10de:053e] (rev a2)
     Subsystem: Biostar Microtech Int'l Corp Device [1565:1406]

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Not enough information has been provided to troubleshoot. See http://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Reporting for instructions on reporting X issues.

[mrproper (ilyevsky)]

Corrected system info since this bug was captured on R9.10 distroes but reported using old 9.04 distro since I was unable to even boot the Carmic Coala on my HW (can't attach Xorg.0.log for this reason).
Added photo of the screen.

[mrproper (ilyevsky)]

managed to pull out Xorg.0.log

[Joseph Miller (josephcmiller2)]

I had a similar problem. I had nvidia driver installed before 9.10 update using nvidia's installer (not Ubunut). I then updated via alternate CDROM. xorg failed to start, and did not even give me an option for low graphics mode. The first Xorg error that I received was that the module nvidia failed to load, which I can understand. I changed this to the nv driver, Xorg log attached.

[lspci]
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C77 [nForce 780a SLI] (rev a2)

This is GeForce 8200

The *bug* part of this is that I didn't even have an option to start in low graphics mode. I realize that my setup was probably invalid. But I was left hanging with a terminal. Now I have been using Ubuntu for some time and Linux for at least 10 years. I am not a novice, but I can't be expected to know everything there is to know about xorg (especially since development can change rapidly). I did happen to find Xorg.conf.failsafe in /etc/X11, but how was I supposed to know that it was there?

[Joseph Miller (josephcmiller2)]

Adding my invalid Xorg.conf - which was NOT corrected by dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. This is the resulting file after running dpkg-reconfigure, then modified to use nv driver. I had previously run nvidia-uninstall. I expected dpkg-reconfigure to fix my problem, is this not the expected behavior? And I know I'm not alone when I ask what ever happened to the prompts that the reconfigure process used to have?

[Joseph Miller (josephcmiller2)]

And here's my lshw

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Joseph, actually you're seeing a different issue than mrproper, probably bug 453365 or bug 438398 or bug 474917 (I think all three may be the same root issue).

[Joseph Miller (josephcmiller2)]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Bryce Harrington
<email address hidden>wrote:

> Joseph, actually you're seeing a different issue than mrproper, probably
> bug 453365 or bug 438398 or bug 474917 (I think all three may be the
> same root issue).
>
>
Thanks Bryce, I couldn't tell because I wasn't really sure what was
happening and the original poster didn't provide a whole lot of information
that I could see what was going on. Anyways, I did get my setup working
within a few minutes of using that xorg.conf.failsave and installed nvidia
proprietary binaries, but I was concerned that more people may be having
this issue so I posted as much as I could.

-Joseph

[Heimen Stoffels (vistaus)]

I can confirm this bug on my Sony Vaio VGN-NW21MF, altough it has an ATI videocard in it. It used to work fine until I upgraded to the -15 kernel via proposed today. Now I also get the low-graphics mode error.

[cyril (ivi610)]

same for me

[Retromingent (ray-rwalk2730)]

I use KDE and got the low-graphics mode error right after a batch of updates today, 12/7/2009. Full hardware configuration attached. Also, since getting the low-graphics mode error after reboot my KDE windows have black backgrounds for all applications. For example, Exaile, Amarok, Chrome, Firefox, all have a dark black backgrounds rather than the color scheme I chose in the appearance settings. In fact, even when I change the color and windowing decorator the black consistently appears. For instance, I can select Oxygen, or Plastik, or any decorator and the black background consistently stays. This does not happen (low-graphics error message or black background) on gdm, only on kdm.

HW summary:
Video card: nVida GForce 8600 GT w/ 512MB RAM (using vendor's driver version 173.14.20)
XOrg version 1.6.4 (10604000)
Linux version: Linux walkubu 2.6.31-16-generic #52-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 3 22:07:16 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux
RAM: 8GB

[Retromingent (ray-rwalk2730)]

Small update to my last post: the "black background" problem I experience with applications since getting the low-graphics mode error message with kdm only occurs if I set the application to use GTK+ themes.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thank you for reporting this issue about xserver-xorg-video-nv. Starting
with Lucid, Ubuntu is transitioning to using the -nouveau video driver
by default instead of -nv. The reason for this change is because
upstream development for the -nv driver has been quite slow. We are
quite pleased with the upstream development speed for -nouveau, and hope
this will translate into swifter bug fixes as well.

Because of this, I'm closing this bug report at this time. I'm marking
it wontfix because what you describe is probably a valid issue, but we
do not have further plans to work on it in Ubuntu. If you would still like
to see this issue investigated, I would encourage you to file it
upstream at http://bugs.freedesktop.org/.