After upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 xorg no screens found

[jsedwards]

I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my Averatec 3225 laptop a few weeks ago and it ran great. So when 9.04 came out I decided to do a clean install of it, and now X windows doesn't start:

(EE) CHROME(0): No valid modes found
(EE) Screens(s) found, but none have a usable configuration

Fatal server error:
no screens found

When I installed 8.10 I had to install the openchrome package, edit the xorg.conf file and then it worked fine.

When I installed 9.04 the xorg.conf file was empty, so I copied the xorg.conf file that I had from 8.10.

Is the xorg.conf file from 8.10 need to be changed for 9.04?

Thanks
-Scott

[tommcd]

You could use the xorg.conf from 8.10 in 9.04 and it will likely work.
Are the open chrome drivers installed in your 9.04? They should have been installed by default. I have xserver-xorg-video-openchrome automatically installed on my laptop; and my laptop uses the intel driver. So the open chrome must have been installed as part of the standard installation.

[jsedwards]

Yes, in 9.04 the openchrome driver was installed by default.

I forgot to mention one thing that might be important: when I went to install 8.10 it would not boot up correctly from the regular Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop i386 CD so I installed it from the Ubuntu 8.10 Alternate i386 CD.

When I installed 9.04, I didn't want to waste time so I didn't try to install from the Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop i386 CD, I started with the Alternate CD.

[jsedwards]

In looking again at the Xorg.0.log, I notice there are some weird warnings that I didn't pay attention to before (I was just looking at the (EE) stuff).

When using the file from 8.10 (which may have been derived from the Ubuntu 6.10 xorg.conf file, I can't remember now) there were these warnings:


(==) ModulePath set to "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
(WW) AllowEmptyInput is on, devices using drivers 'kbd', 'mouse' or 'vmmouse' will be disabled.
(WW) Disabling Generic Keyboard
(WW) Disabling Configured Mouse

Since that xorg.conf file could be really old (the paths to the fonts were wrong) I decided to try another xorg.conf file from another machine. It doesn't work either, but it also seems to complain about no mouse or keyboard:


(==) ModulePath set to "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
(II) Cannot locate a core pointer device.
(II) Cannot locate a core keyboard device.
(II) The server relies on HAL to provide the list of input devices.
If no devices become available, reconfigure HAL or disable AllowEmptyInput.

With both xorg.conf files it repeats that no modes work over and over for various sizes, the correct size should be 1024x768, but they all fail:


(II) CHROME(0): ViaFirstCRTCModeValid
(II) CHROME(0): ViaPanelGetIndex
(II) CHROME(0): ViaPanelGetIndex: Mode not supported by Panel.
(II) CHROME(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (unknown reason)
(II) CHROME(0): Not using default mode "512x384" (bad mode clock/interlace/doublescan)
(II) CHROME(0): ViaValidMode: Validating 1024x768 (75000)

[jsedwards]

I'm sorry, I gave up last night and reinstalled 8.10 on my laptop. I had hoped I could contribute and solve the problem for those who had the same problem. I spent at least 6 or 7 hours trying to solve it, with no luck, and I just couldn't afford any more time. (Plus it cost me almost 3 hours to reinstall 8.10 and get it all configured again because I only did a partial backup before I installed 9.04.)

A few days ago there was a thread in this forum asking everyone to describe their 9.04 install or upgrade experience. While I was fooling with 9.04 it seems to have disappeared. So I thought I would just comment here. This experience with 9.04 made me realize that upgrading some machines is just always going to be a crap shoot.

I originally had SuSE Linux on this laptop, it has been so many years since then I don't remember how well that worked. IIRC the built-in wireless never worked, I had to plug in a wireless card.

I think I tried Kubuntu 5.10 on it. But again it has been so many years, I can't remember how well that worked, if at all.

I had Kubuntu 6.06 on it for a while and it seems like that worked pretty well, except for the wireless. Once in a while the wireless worked, but it was pretty rare.

I upgraded to Kubuntu 6.10 and it worked okay, the wireless rarely worked, and the sound stopped working. I screwed around with the sound off and on, but never got it to work. It wasn't essential so I just left it and used it without sound.

I tried to upgrade to Kubuntu 7.04 and the CD wouldn't even boot up... well it would but, and I am not making this up, it took over an hour to boot up. I think something in Kubuntu 7.04 wanted more memory than this laptop has, because I installed Xubuntu 7.04 and it worked normally. Xubuntu looked nice but I didn't have time to learn it at the time, so I reverted back to Kubuntu 6.10.

I can't remember if I ever had time to try 7.10. I think I skipped over it and tried Kubuntu 8.04. It installed okay, but the sound still didn't work. I spent a couple of hours and finally discovered there was an obtuse mixer setting that was the problem. I assume that may have been the problem in 6.10 too. I never could get the networking to work (Ethernet or Wireless). BTW - I thought the Network Settings GUI in that version made no sense at all.

I should explain that I have been using Linux since 1998 and I have a lot of experience with setting up the Ethernet. I have used RedHat SuSE, Xandros, Gentoo, Debian, Arch, Zenwalk, Fedora, WhiteBox, CentOS and several others. Over a period of weeks I fooled around trying to get the networking in 8.04 working. I even had the IT guy at work, who also has a lot of Linux experience, look at it. He couldn't get it to work either.

I tried Kubuntu 8.10 and I want to say that I applaud the KDE people for trying new things. However, I found the new KDE 4.x cumbersome. If I had time to spend learning it and tweaking it, perhaps I could get it to my liking, I don't know.

By this time I had gNewSense on another machine of mine. Since it had Gnome as the default desktop, I found that most of things I previously didn't like about Gnome could be configured to my liking. I don't like the tabs at the top of Gnome terminal but I have found a patch that will hopefully fix that. There is some bad interaction between Emacs and Gnome Terminal that drives me insane, so I may switch to a different terminal altogether.

Meanwhile back at the laptop, I tried a couple of other distros on it without success. Then I decided since Gnome seemed workable on one of my desktops, I would try Ubuntu 8.10. As I mentioned in my original posting to this thread, there was a little fooling around to get Xorg working, but then everything else worked very well. For the first time on this laptop, the wireless worked wonderfully. I was in heaven! After all these years the wireless just worked, I didn't have to do anything!!

I was so happy with Ubuntu 8.10 that when 9.04 came out I thought I just have to try it, I'll bet it is even better than 8.10. Oh well, I am still really, really happy with 8.10. If I can free up some time and a separate partition, I may try to experiment with 9.04 some more. Of course, I'm so slow, 9.10 will probably be out by then :)