10.4 upgrade failure, ATI video problem.

[clabrown]

Upgrade 9.10 to 10.4 failed in at least 2 ways.

1. Dual boot XP Pro no longer booting into XP, just looping back into grub menu screen... fixed that with XP install CD recovery console fixboot command.

2. Apparent video problem booting into Ubuntu with ATI brand Radeon 9700 connected to 1680x1050 LCD monitor. Originally just had black screen. Tried fix found in the forum of editing the grub command and adding nomodeset, then going to Administration - Hardware Driver to select a better video driver. This allowed boot into new purple desktop, but the display is at 1280x1024, and going to the Hardware Driver application shows "No proprietary drivers in use" after searching. I don't know if this tool is supposed to identify the hardware and tell me what is available, or if I have to do something else to get it to recognize the ATI card. I'm surprised that ubuntu was not able it identify the card since it's a fairly standard ATI card, perhaps it's just too old.

[frantid]

use synaptic and search for fglrx or ati . You are looking for an updated modealias package for fglrx. That might allow it to detect your card.

[clabrown]

I tried fglrx in synaptic and it seems to have loaded the only modalias I see listed as well. No change in behavior.

[frantid]

are jockey-gtk and jockey-common loaded?

I suppose you could try to load the fglrx driver manually through synaptic, but it's probably not a good idea. Do you still have nomodeset on the boot line? You might not need it after the latest updates, I suppose that might be stopping it from detecting your card.

Hopefully, someone else that has ati experience will chime in.

[clabrown]

Yes, jockey-gtk and jockey-common appear to be loaded... or at least selected in synaptic.

I don't think the nomodeset command is still in the boot. To use it I used the edit option in grub, which seemed to get it working to start with. On subsequent boots when I do the edit option in grub I do NOT see nomodset where I typed it in, or anywhere else. I don't know what the effect of nomodeset is, or if it saved something in a config file to permanently affect the boot up, but now it seems to be working without the nomodeset. As a test I added it again in grub but it made no difference in detecting the video card... or anything else that I could tell.