Comment 2 for bug 301403

I can confirm this bug. I upgraded my sister's Averatec 3260 laptop from 8.04 to 8.10 yesterday. She had previously been using the via driver (xserver-xorg-video-via), which never worked well, but it did the job. After upgrading to Intrepid, however, X would consistently freeze shortly after starting, and the machine would be unresponsive until I did a hard reset.

The machine looks very similar to the one detailed by the original poster. The video card is:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800/K8N800/K8N800A [S3 UniChrome Pro] [1106:3108] (rev 01)

Using the openchrome driver with the fix mentioned above (Option "XaaNoImageWriteRect", Option "SWcursor"), X works better than it ever did in Hardy. (Thanks to anyone who did work to make that possible!) Without those options, X still freezes shortly after starting.

So, though the system does work better now than it did before, I had to go through a long process of figuring out what had happened (via drivers were dropped in Intrepid), figuring out what the fix was (using openchrome instead), and tweaking it to get the system fully usable (adding the extra options to prevent X from hanging under openchrome).

It seems like people who are using the via driver should *at least* get a warning when they do a dist-upgrade that their X configuration may become unusable, and a hint that they should try the openchrome driver instead.