Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 2: Worst-case X scenario (no video)

When upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 this morning, I purposefully did not make any changes to my "custom" xorg.conf. You know, the one that made my Intel video chip (82830, for those keeping score) work in Ubuntu 9.04.

Yes it used EXA acceleration and not UXA. But it worked in 9.04, and I was curious as to what the Ubuntu upgrade process would do about it.

Turns out, nothing.

Yes, post-upgrade, my Intel-video-equipped Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop has NO video in X. I can't even bring up a terminal outside of X, it's that messed up.

I knew this could happen. I pretty much think I know how to fix it. I haven't done that yet.

I used one of my Puppy Linux CDs that happens to work in the Toshiba's very touchy CD drive — version 2.16 (again submitted for those keeping score) — and at first I renamed my xorg.conf to xorg.conf.old and rebooted Ubuntu 9.10.

I wanted to see how Ubuntu 9.10 would deal with the Intel 82830 graphics chip with no xorg.conf file.

No change. No X. Time to pull out the UXA acceleration hack.

I got most of the code from this blog post by Ivan Kristianto, which I previously mentioned here.

I didn't do everything he suggested, but I did use this code for the "Device" section of xorg.conf (ignore the skipped lines ... it's a CSS issue in Movable Type):

Section "Device"
Identifier    "Configured Video Device"
Option        "AccelMethod"            "uxa"
Option        "EXAOptimizeMigration"        "true"
Option        "MigrationHeuristic"        "greedy"
# Option        "Tiling"            "true" # i8xx users: set to false
EndSection

As you can see, I didn't use the "Tiling" option, either true or false.

Well, X still didn't work. I thought I had this one in the proverbial bag.

And remember. I've been doing this for a couple of years. I've suffered through a lot of sub-par Intel video and numerous xorg.conf hacks. And I still couldn't get it to work.

So I turned to the world's oracle (not Oracle, capital O, but oracle, small o) — Google.

Would the vast Ubuntu user community have solved this issue already? Stay tuned for my next post to find out.

Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10: An opera in three acts:

• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 1: Eyes wide open/shut
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 2: Worst-case X scenario (no video)
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 3: Bringing X back from the dead (and why, oh why didn't the installer just do this for me?)