Display problems

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 2012-09-18 at 22:41 +0100, David King wrote:
> I am having some problems with drivers for my graphics card. It is a
> Sapphire Radeon HD 7750, and I am using a fresh install of Ubuntu
> Studio 12.04, updated online after installing.
> When I install the proprietary drivers for it, and then reboot, I get
> a blank screen instead of the login screen.
> 
> I tried the following from the CLI:
> 
> apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev*
> xorg-driver-fglrx
> apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati
> xserver-xorg-video-radeon
> apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
> apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri
> xserver-xorg-core
> mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
> 
> 
> This seems to get back to a basic graphics driver with limited
> resolutions. 
> 
> Is there a way to get a driver installed that will give me a higher
> resolution, specifically 1900 x 1080?

To use another graphics IMO does cause the less pain, but isn't a
guaranty to get no issues. YMMV!

Regards,
Ralf

Some blah blah that explains my experiences.

The on-board ATI of my mobo does work with the FLOSS driver, but it
doesn't work with the proprietary driver, while it's a card that's
listed of being supported.

I disabled my on-board ATI, bought an elCheapo second-hand NVIDIA. Close
after that the FLOSS NVIDIA driver was dropped, resp. replaced by
another FLOSS driver for most distros and both tricks to use the
proprietary NVIDIA driver with a kernel-rt don't work on my machine. In
the meantime the new NIVIDIA FLOSS driver does work on my machine, but
it's unusable for audio productions, since I get xruns already when
audio is quasi idle. I suspect we have to use the vesa driver and can't
chose the resolutions we need.
At the moment I tend to use Arch Linux more often than Ubuntu Studio
Precise, because on Arch they still keep the old FLOSS NVIDIA driver.
Yesterday I tested the new FLOSS NVIDIA driver on Arch Linux and now I
struggle to get the old FLOSS and/or proprietary NVIDIA driver working
again. Not easy, since the new deriver can't simply be removed.

If you don't need a kernel-rt, I recommend to replace the ATI with an
elCheapo NVIDIA. You also can test what happens if you compile X
including the needed driver yourself. From time to time I replace Ubuntu
packages with self-build packages, since I often run into issues.

For example, in the past it was a common issue that Jack for Debian and
Ubuntu had issues to link jack libraries correctly, because of the
insane policy to split Jack into different packages and bad packaging.
Since some years this issue is fixed, but yesterday I experienced that a
driver is missing for Jack. If you won't compile X yourself, than you
could test if a live CD of another distro does work with your card.

I always run several distros on my machine, to avoid being limited to
the policy of one distro. You might have heard about the different ways
Linux distros do the startup now and in the near future and all the
flame wars caused by this. Using Linux demands versatility.