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LegendaryLegume
December 27th, 2011, 09:51 PM
A while back my old Windows XP machine (an HP Pavilion
a824n) had a bunch of software problems that led me to buy a
new machine. I didn't want to throw away still functional
hardware, so I wiped the hard drive and did a pristine
installation of Ubuntu 10.04 (with a bunch of security
updates subsequently added). (I'm not dual-booting; it's
the only operating system on the drive now.) Being a long
time fan of UNIX, I was very pleased with my 'new' system.
However, after several weeks of use, I started periodically
(and inexplicably) getting a dialog that says

"Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode

Your screen graphics card, and input device settings
could not be detected correctly. You will need to
configure these yourself."

I have no idea what caused this problem in the first place,
but I note that the problem began to occur much more
frequently (several times a day) when I switched from the
default screensaver to the Hypertorus theme. When it occurs
the only useful thing I can do is reboot (and hope that my
file system is getting fsck'ed to clean up all the dangling
file pointers).

After looking for instances of this problem, it appears to
be quite common, but it doesn't seem to have a uniform
cause, except that it somehow involves the graphics card
and/or the driver. My machine has the Intel Graphics Media
Accelerator 900, and one listing showed my graphics chip as
being the Intel 82915G/GV/910GL Ingegrated Graphics
Controller (rev 04).

In my X server log, I found messages like

(11) intel(0): Initializing HW Cursor
(11) intel(0): No memory allocations

Fatal server error:
Failed to submit batchbuffer: input/output error

This problem is really driving me nuts, and I'm going to
have to abandon Ubuntu in favor of some other distribution
if I can't figure out how to fix this. I would be very
grateful for some clues on how to proceed. Thanks!

LegendaryLegume
December 29th, 2011, 08:39 PM
Surely someone on this forum has encountered this problem? It seems to be well-known elsewhere on the Web. Can anyone tell me whether this problem is known to occur on Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10? (I have a feeling that it would, since the Unity-based releases seem to want to use fancier graphics.)