dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
July 4, 2008 9:11 am GeneralFor anyone who has experienced pain when upgrading to a more recent version of Ubuntu with X and xrandr on Intel hardware, consider running this fabulous command.
This goes in particular for anyone who needed i915resolution before for wide-screens, and had a “ForceBIOS” option in xorg.conf. The driver to use for the hardware changed, and the xorg.conf got about 100 times smaller since Ubuntu 6.06 or 7.04.
This is the major weakness in the Ubuntu upgrade process, really… if hacks are needed to work around falings in previous versions, those hacks are (silently, IIRC) kept after an upgrade, even though they’re no longer necessary (and are, in fact, harmful).
Many thanks once again to Claude Paroz, wo helped me work through the projector problem & got me moving towards the fix.
July 4th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Do you mean that 915resolution is no longer necessary?
Anyway, reconfigure had no effect on X-hangs-on-every-second resume behaviour I get with Hardy :-/
July 4th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
The reason for that is pretty simple. Many many people have custom options that remain necessary in the current X server, and we didn’t want to break those configurations. If people are able to manage their own xorg.conf, I assumed that they know what they were doing and didn’t mess with their systems.
The ultimate goal, still in progress, is to get rid of xorg.conf all together except in extreme cases, at which point this problem goes away. We’re pretty close now, since we don’t need to specify very much which means that the package scripts can ignore all those old sections entirely (fonts, modules, etc), but there’s still a ways to go. If some of the more hardcore stuff like input config moves in to HAL config files then we won’t have to worry about xorg.conf, and whatever the user puts in should remain relevant.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
I can feel your pain. While upgrading seems to work most of the time, it’s usually not as clean as reinstalling.
After years of dist-upgrading my Ubuntu box (from Hoary to Hardy…), I decided it’s safer to just reinstall from scratch.
July 4th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Vladimir, yes 915-resolution is totally obsolete as of the switch from i810 to intel (1.x->2.x). You shouldn’t use it any more.