I've been looking into some problems people have been reporting upgrading to Karmic with -nvidia installed.
One thing I've noticed is aside from whatever issue is occuring with nvidia, there are bugs elsewhere which are compounding the problems and leading to some poor user experiences. A common scenario occurs if for whatever reason the -nvidia kernel module fails to build in DKMS: 438398 - If DKMS fails to build the kernel module, the package upgrade does not kick out. It shows package upgrade as successful. So this leads directly to... 451305 - Jockey misses that the driver failed to build, and so is not letting users know about the potential problem. It goes ahead and updates xorg.conf as if the driver was there. X tries to obey the configuration settings, but of course they won't work, so it exits on startup with an error message. *Normally* bulletproof-X would kick in at this point, display the error to the user, and give them some tools to diagnose and/or debug the situation. Unfortunately... 474806 - The new gdm no longer supports the FailsafeXServer option, so the diagnostic session no longer can be triggered to come up. Instead, gdm tries several times, then gives up, but then... 441638 - The gdm upstart job notices gdm has failed and so restarts it. X of course continues to fail, gdm tries a few times and continues to fail, repeat ad infinitum, and the user is just left looking at a flashing screen. Ick. The above appears to be a pretty common scenario that we're getting a rash of bug reports about. It's hard to be certain because many of the bug reports are only including information about the failed boot, not on the failed build. So I'm not sure if it is just one reason why the build fails, or several. However if we can solve the above bugs it should give much better visibility into things. Btw, workaround for anyone experiencing this issue is to purge your nvidia (and fglrx) packages, remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and reinstall nvidia (or fglrx). It appears that in most of the bug reports this gets the system functioning again. Doing a full reinstall of Ubuntu rather than an upgrade also appears to work around the issues. Bryce -- Ubuntu-x mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-x
