How to repair xorg without reinstalling ubuntu?

[Grey Box]

I am running Jaunty 64bit (Thinkpad T500 with GMA 4500 integrated intel grpahics) which I installed during the testing period last year. Since then something happened to my intel xorg drivers and, basically, they don't work (garbled screen, regardless of xorg.conf settings) and I am stuck using the vesa drivers. Everything works from a live usb, including 3d acceleration, but I don't want to have to reinstall!

How can I perform a complete reconfiguration of xorg so that it completely resets its files and drivers to default? Which packages must I remove/reinstall to achieve this?

Thanks very much in advance.

[pastalavista]

I'm not versed in xorg files but you can boot in recovery mode and the last option in the list of tasks is xfix. It's saved me a couple of times.

[Grey Box]

I just tried that, however it appears to only repair xorg.conf. In any case, no joy. I think somewhere I have a corrupted or incompatible package that is causing problems - hence why I think I need to reinstall xorg and its drivers.

[pbpersson]

remove:

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg

install:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg

reconfigure:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

[Grey Box]

Thankyou pbpersson,

I just performed those commands. It went along smoothly and xorg was reinstalled, etc.

Unfortunately, it has not fixed my problem. I cannot figure out where the issue is now. I would have thought that all of the video related packages and configuration options are reinstalled with those commands, but the video still crashes on trying the intel drivers instead of vesa.

Perhaps I will have to reinstall the entire OS after all?

[pbpersson]

Everything works from a live usb, including 3d acceleration, but I don't want to have to reinstall!

What is different on the live USB? How is it setup? How does xorg.conf appear? What driver version is used? Are there other configuration settings outside of xorg.conf?

[Grey Box]

The live USB is the generic [actually, amd64] 9.04 desktop version, with no modifications. It doesn't have an xorg.conf. My hard drive install is 9.04 [amd 64] with all updates, no experimental repositories and no xorg.conf.

My current intel-xorg drivers are 2.6.3.

The behaviour I'm having isn't any of the known bugs with the intel drivers, but on trying to enable 3D effects, it "searchers for available drivers" then dies without a message - xorg restarts and I have to login again, with vesa drivers. I'm guessing that a config file somewhere or a library or something is broken or the wrong version, but at that point it's way beyond my abilities I think.

[pbpersson]

When you ran the "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" command it was supposed to write all the settings to the xorg.conf file. I don't understand how you can be running XServer without an xorg.conf file so I am clearly no help to you. You must be running a totally different sort of setup.

[Grey Box]

When you ran the "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" command it was supposed to write all the settings to the xorg.conf file. I don't understand how you can be running XServer without an xorg.conf file so I am clearly no help to you. You must be running a totally different sort of setup.

I very much appreciate your help all the same!

With the latest xorg you can pretty much do away with the xorg.conf for many configurations, because it auto-detects on startup and adjusts to whatever display and graphics card you might have (eg: external displays and so on), depending on available drivers.

I've probably broken something along the way without realizing it. When I have a moment I'll take a look at the log files and see if I can understand any of them.

Either way I'll inform the thread of my outcome. Cheers.

[pastalavista]

remove:

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg

install:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg

reconfigure:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Follow pbpersson's advice again, but in the first command, use

sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg

The --purge will also remove your config files.