GPU help

[Skooter]

I finally managed to get the drivers for my gpu. But, I'm having some problems. Certain apps won't come up, like "Display". When I click on it, I get bars going up an down my screen and it won't come up. I have to force quit, but the bars remain until I adjust the resolution(which doesn't actually change. I'll change it, save it, close it. When I come back, its still the same).

Any idea of whats going on here? My GPU is an ATI Radeon HD 4850.

[Skooter]

Okay, now I REALLY need help!!!

I uninstalled a few gpu drivers that I thought were causing the problem. When I re-booted, I totally lost my panel bar and I can't get it back! I think I broke Jaunty... I have no way of navigating now... what just happened and why?

[Skooter]

Okay, now its broke... wont even boot at all now. Seriously, I thought Linux was more robust than this? I've done way worse to windows and have never seen anything like this happen. Nothing I did should have caused this. Totally ridiculous.

[reed9]

It's helpful if you include what drivers you installed and other pertinent steps you took, even if the same info is in another post, so we don't have to go and try to reference it.

When you say it won't boot at all, what do you mean? If it's just the graphical environment, that's fixable. If you're unable to get even to a console login, that's a problem.

Linux is quite robust, but in many cases when people refer to it's stability and robustness, they're talking about the kernel and core system, not as much the applications running on top of that. Also, while it's robust, it doesn't prevent anyone with root priveleges from utterly destroying the system.

[Skooter]

Well, the drivers were for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series. Upon updating to Jaunty, it had two drivers already installed(according to package manager), but my comp still said that the GPU had no drivers, so I installed the other two with package manager to complete the bundle.. Restarted, everything seemed fine. Had an issue with resolution and size, but I worked that out. But then I noticed that certain apps wouldn't come up and when they tried I would get bars across the screen(Display menu, for ex.). So, thinking that the two drivers I uninstalled were bad, I removed them via package manager. Restarted. That's when I noticed that my panel was gone, and I couldn't bring it back. I then went to windows so I could contact a friend, he gave me suggestions to try. So I tried again to get in Linux, except this time it hung after the loading screen, and three purple, fuzzy Ubuntu logos hung near the top of the screen. No mouse pointer. No action. Had no choice but to hard shutdown.

I then tried one of my friends suggestions(the only one I could try with no terminal): to change my kernel arguments. I set the kernel from "splash" to "single". It ran a disk check afterwards due to improper shutdown, said there were errors, restarted. That didn't work... same thing when I re-booted...

Whether it will boot with the terminal, I don't know, haven't tried. I doubt it will though.

I think that's about it...

I hate to sound like so much like a "former Windows user; Linux newb", but... can't I just roll the system back somehow? That is a great feature.... saved my arse numerous times...

[reed9]

There is a newer filesystem called ZFS designed by Sun that promises easy snapshots of the system you can roll back to, but that has yet to be integrated into linux.

Anyway, when you get to whatever wonky graphical screen that comes up, try and hit CTRL+ALT+F1. This should take you into a console login. Assuming it does, remove the catalyst driver, if you have it installed, and the radeonhd driver. Then make sure you have the open source xf86-video-ati driver.

sudo apt-get remove xf86-video-radeonhd
sudo apt-get remove catalyst
sudo apt-get install xf86-video-ati

Note, I'm not 100% sure that the catalyst package is just called catalyst. You can probably find the exact name with dpkg -l | grep catalyst

Reconfigure youre xorg.conf file.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Restart and see how it goes.

[Skooter]

Yeah, my friend told me to do something similar to that, but hitting alt+ctrl+f1 doesn't work....

Anything else I can do? Can I just wipe out the OS? Cause I actually would like to re-install it anyway... I didn't give linux enough hard drive space. That would NOT hurt my feelings any... luckily there isn't much on it because I wanted to get it working right before I got all app-happy...

[reed9]

You can certainly just reinstall. I've done that a number of times when I've messed something up badly, and fixing it seemed more trouble than it's worth. If you've got stuff on the harddrive you want to backup, you can boot into a live cd and copy the files to an external drive.

[Skooter]

Awesome. I did not know that about the live CD! I didn't know I could still read my stuff and back it up that way! I would have to use the Intrepid 8.10 disk though... don't have the 9.04 disk... is that okay? After that, I just tell the cd to install and that will delete the old and install fresh?

[reed9]

Yup, the 8.10 would be fine. Well, with one potential caveat...did you format your harddrive to ext 4? If you stuck with the Ubuntu defaults, you're fine. You can use whichever distro you want, but the key is that it can read the file system. Ext4 has just recently been fully integrated, and will probably become the default filesystem soon for most distros (Fedora is already doing that with the new release), but that means some older releases will no longer be able to read the disc.

After you backup, just click install, it will guide you through. During the partition hard drive section, choose to use the whole disc, and it will overwrite and format everything.