New Failsafe Graphics Mode For Ubuntu

ianare sends us to Ars Technica for news of the Ubuntu Xorg BulletProof-X feature, coming soon to a 7.10 (Gutsy) build near you. "It provides a failsafe mode that will ensure that users never have to manually configure their graphics hardware settings from the command line. If Xorg fails to start,the failsafe mode will initiate with minimalistic settings, low resolution, and a limited number of colors. The failsafe mode also automatically runs Ubuntu's new GTK-based display configuration utility so that users can easily test various display settings and choose a configuration that will work properly with their hardware."

Comments

great!

[datapharmer]

This is great, but should have been done a long time ago! I have heard several people say they "tried ubuntu but it wouldn't work"... I determined the graphics failure to be an issue 100% of the time.

Thanks, Ubuntu.

[Esteanil]

Although I've haven't had *nix installed on any of my home computers yet, I'm very happy indeed that Windows XP looks to be the last MS OS I will ever use.
Changing to Linux is now something I'm thinking about on at least a weekly basis, and the upcoming version Ubuntu seems very likely to make me leave Windows. (Except for a small gaming partition).

Nice

[PhaxMohdem]

This has been a problem I've run into a lot as a Linux novice, and newly converted user to Ubuntu 7.04. I really wish that someone would make dual/multi display configuration much more intuitive. In Windows even the n00best of n00bs can easily configure a dual monitor setup. In the various Linux flavors I've tried it is not that simple. Seems like the system display configuration utility and the video drivers I install for nVidia/ATI cards just want to fight each other over who gets to control that second monitor, instead of just working like it does in Windows. Like I said, total novice here so I don't know if its an issue with the distro's themselves, or the third party drivers by nVidia/ATI, all I know is it is annoying, and one of the major caveats preventing me from totally embracing the penguin.

I think that is more a problem of perception.

[khasim]

Linux is generally nice and stable, but when it does go wrong, to most people it's just far, far too hard to recover your installation back into a working state - much more so than, dare I say it, Windows.

I think that that is the case ONLY because those people are coming from a Windows background.

Personally, I find it far, Far, FAR, FAR easier to recover a damaged Linux box than a damaged Windows box. But that is primarily because the damaged Windows boxes that I get have major Registry issues.

As long as you can get an Ubuntu box to boot to the command line, it is "easy" to fix. "Easy" is in quotes because it takes a little bit of knowledge. But not much. I'm running Gutsy Gibbon at home and even with 2 problems (it is still alpha) I've been able to recover my system without rebooting in less than 5 minutes.

The magic is in APT and the repositories. As long as I can connect to the repositories and run APT, I can remove the problem or re-install over it.

As more people become familiar with Ubuntu (and Debian and Debian-based distributions) the "fear" of Linux will vanish. It's just so much EASIER than Windows. (unless your hardware isn't supported but that's a different issue)

Re:I think that is more a problem of perception.

[Kangburra]

P.S.: Mandriva 4 ever, screw this Ubundu fad. Mandrake was the first user-friendly distro and still holds the crown. 8-)

Sorry, I can't let that go.

Yes Mandrake was the first user-friendly distro, but they messed up several times.

1) Adverts in the installer
2) All the .0 and .1 releases had new bugs.
3) Sacking of Gael Duval was the final straw. It shows the mentality of a lost management team.

Ubuntu has filled the gap left by where Mandrake could have been and Mandriva is.

Re:This is the sort of thing OS needs to focus on

[Otter]

As silly as it sounds...new Linux users...Whilst to the average Slashdotter this may sound silly...your average Joe...

I've been using Linux since MkLinux zero-point-something, and when I had to update a Gentoo box from XFree to X.org, my old conf file didn't work and xconfigurator (or whichever one the command-line tool is called) didn't generate a working file. Eventually it turned out that a serial mouse isn't supported, and switching to a USB mouse allowed a working conf file to be generated that I could then tweak. I never did get the beloved old mouse working.

So anything that improves the X configuration process is a very welcome improvement over calling users names when the crappy old tools don't work.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

X11 brought a standard means of controlled extensions to the X protocol. So called "X extensions". So the need for a new protocol revision number for anything other than marketing purposes would be quite miniscule, though these days much of the drawing on your desktop is happening through an extension (e.g. X composite, render, glx ...) rather than core X.

The only thing that would merit it would be a fundamental change to the rendering model necessitating a core protocol change, and really, X's rendering model is quite reasonable (though individual implementations are sometimes lacking in implementation terms in some areas - X.org (and XFree86 before it) have shockingly slow nested subwindow support, for no good reason- in the end, people like Trolltech (Qt) have made a decision, and moved away from subwindows, because it's faster for them to emulate them than use native subwindows. Which is pretty dumb, since X had subwindows specifically to make toolkit implementors lives mh easier (then again, MacOSX native GUI doesn't support native subwindows, and Qt being crossplatform they had to implement an emulation anyway). But you don't need to change the protocol to improve that, just fix X.org to Not Suck).

Re:I suggested this ages ago!

[Theovon]

You seem to forget that they ALREADY have this tool. It runs when you install the OS! It's very smart and figures out exactly what card you have and everything!

The problems occur when you do something as simple as move the graphics card to a different slot after installation. X is not smart enough to figure out that it just needs to substitute a different PCI bus ID.

It doesn't look that good..

[NekoXP]

Assumptions:

1) You're running an x86 PC with a VESA compliant graphics card, or any platform which has 'legacy VGA' registers mapped. What about PPC or something? It's frighteningly rare for the kernel framebuffer not to work on these platforms but there are some times where the X.org driver/autodetect or most commonly GDM doesn't quite configure your card correctly and hands you a garbage display. I never understood why X.org can't have a TRUE framebuffer console driver which simply inherits the mode the kernel gives it.

This isn't bulletproof it's just a band-aid.

2) Everyone loves GTK+ - well, I pretty much don't. Does this mean the Kubuntu guys have to install GTK now? Actually not, because there is a cute KDE app for it, but seriously.. why does everyone fawn over the GTK stuff and never show the Qt stuff?

In fact, it turns out this was a KDE app to start with. Quote;

displayconfig-gtk is a GTK/Python frontend being developed for KDE's guidance configuration system by glatzor, mvo, and others. In addition to using this in the failsafe mode, this is plugged into Ubuntu's System / Administration menu so users can also use it for configuring their system once successfully booted into X (shown below).

Which just begs the question, why wasn't this news when the KDE app got written?

3) Everyone loves GDM, well, I don't. What's up with KDM these days? Does it handle it better? None of the developers are telling the success story on any project I'm watching right now, it's all "GDM breaks this" and "we have problems with that". So it worked on KDE before, but nobody thought to say "this is a great feature, now we port it to GTK"?

There are some very strange priorities in the software world these days.. bug reports flood the net and nobody talks about anything being finished..