Impressions of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and the new X.org
Edit: Don’t read this. It’s just an angry rant. Read this instead, as it has actual information in it.
When I was contemplating upgrading from Ubuntu 7.10, the thing I was most worried about was the new PulseAudio subsystem being integrated into the system this release cycle. I know how much pain this caused a lot of people in the Fedora community, and I was a little apprehensive about it.
Turns out that PulseAudio actually works better than the old ESD/ALSA crap. It works way better, in fact. I installed padevchooser and it just worked. Still not the most user-friendly tool ever, but good enough for my purposes. All my applications seem to work with PulseAudio just as well as with the old and busted.
What I hadn’t been expecting, and what blind-sided me, was the X.org changes. I had heard rumblings about the auto-whatever, the new screen choosing/cloning applet, et cetera. Upon install X detected my two primary monitors (and nvidia-settings stitched them together with TwinView), which is fine and dandy, but that’s not all that I have connected to my computer. I have two X screens, not just one. Two monitors are connected to one screen, one monitor and a TV output are connected to the other. I can move between the two with my mouse, and I had learned xorg.conf-speak in order to be able to do this.
8.04 just destroyed that setup. The stupid, useless, craptacular, utterly functionality-bare Screen Resolution tool won’t detect my two primary monitors on videocard0, much less actually stitch them together to make one giant monitor like it should. Very much less detect the other two screens on videocard1. It won’t do this with the nv driver, it won’t do this with the nvidia driver from the repos, it won’t do this with the beta driver from Nvidia.com, it just doesn’t work. Period. Ubuntu’s default install still lacks all the tools needed to operate with two monitors, something that quite a few people I know are fond of and even find indispensable.
I’m so utterly frustrated with the whole fiddling with configurations thing. I recognize that Ubuntu, so far, is the best in breed of distributions, and when setting this computer up from scratch, I have no other complaint except for displays. That’s it. But this has been a thorn in the side of the Linux Desktop for many, many years now. I don’t know if the blame lies in using what seems to be an antiquated display system or binary drivers or whatever, but I simply can’t stand how this goes on and on and on.
I booted into Ubuntu just now with my two monitors and Twinview seemed to work fine. The splash page, at least, did that annoying thing where it centered the login prompt in the middle of the 2880 x 900 screen, right in the middle of the gap between two monitors, so that half my login is on one monitor and half on the other. This is okay with me; I’ve grown used to sort of glancing from one to the other. It lets me know that Twinview is working and that when Gnome starts up, I’ll be able to use all that screen real estate.
Nope! Gnome decides to switch one of my monitors off! Wonderful, thank you Gnome. It turns out that I have two metamodes in my xorg.conf, one for both monitors one, one for one monitor off and the other on, and that Gnome decided in its inexplicable wisdom to choose the second. Before you ask me why I don’t just eliminate one metamode, I’ll tell you that I play UrbanTerror, and if I don’t have that second metamode, when it plays fullscreen it does that annoying center-of-the-screen thing (like the Gnome splash), and while I can tolerate that elsewhere, playing a game is different. I want it on one screen. So I need both metamodes.
So I surf the web trying to find an answer. There is none. Most people seem rather confused as to why xorg.conf is just a stub these days, and I keep hearing rumblings about something called xrandr whose manpage is — in typical UNIX fashion — complete and utter gibberish to anyone who doesn’t already understand the tool. So I’m left to figure out on my own why X can’t initialize two screens with four monitors, using a perfectly good xorg.conf that worked just fine on Ubuntu 7.10 and the three releases before that. Finally, I decide to fire up displayconfig-gtk, which I’m told can hose my display configuration (couldn’t get more hosed, thank you!), and I find to my utter surprise that while X, nvidia-settings, and Screen Resolution cannot detect my monitors, displayconfig-gtk can… just not all four. Only two. One on each videocard. Hooray! So I set the second (on videocard1) to the primary display and find to my great astonishment that it works just fine. But only it works, and nothing else. Just the one monitor. And though nvidia-settings says the TV-out is working, it is not. So I have just the one monitor now.
I say to myself, okay, this sucks, I’ll go back to the original settings. I do this, and lo and behold I log out and log back in to find that Gnome has magically decided to use the first metamode and not the second. The second metamode is still there — I checked — but Gnome is using the first now. Why? I have no idea. I’m afraid to restart the computer now, as if I do, I might never be able to use Twinview properly again.
I absolutely cannot believe this. I know I’m a edge use case. Not a lot of people are running this many screens and monitors. But for the love of all that is good, why does my old xorg.conf not work? Has Hardy introduced a regression that causes dual videocard motherboards to ignore the second card unless a live chicken is sacrificed and something goes horribly wrong?
Gah. I’m going back to Gutsy, I really am. I can install PulseAudio myself, and install FF3 myself, thankyouverymuch. I can’t see any other big changes — except for, you know, the bad ones — that would compel me to do otherwise. I just hope that torrent is still alive somewhere.
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I’m having similar frustrations. I used two monitors with my desktop rig with the last version of Ubuntu and upgrading made it impossible to use. I’ve since gone back to XP. :-/
Now I’m trying to set up an older laptop with the same version and the resolution is different every time I boot. When I can ACTUALLY see the desktop through a haze of static and double-images (and the monitor is working) adjusting the settings through the gui is doing absolutely nothing. I ended up trying the good old dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg command but of course it’s useless, and I found your helpful blog to tell me why. Arg. If I don’t figure this out soon I’ll be hitting up the linux help forums… shudder.. :-P
Ubuntuforums.org are a great place, but their search really blows, so it’s hard to find exactly what I need to find on this.
From what I can understand, my problem results because the X server included with Hardy uses a newer version of xrandr than the binary NVidia drivers support, thus the breakage.
I understand that, that’s not Ubuntu’s fault, of course they can’t fix code that they can’t see and distribute. But then it should work with the NV driver, its open-source bastard cousin, which hasn’t been my experience at all. Plus, I rather like Compiz.
What really gets me is how my screens are no longer properly detected. I can live with that as long as I can simply force X do what I want it to — I’m willing to tinker for a few hours — but it would appear I can no longer do that. Perhaps it’s just the general lack of information in the community about the most recent changes to X.org. I don’t know. I haven’t found a way to get around any of this.
Plus other bizarre things are happening now. Even with just two monitors, full screen games seem to switch metamodes after about 20 minutes which completely borks all input. I have to drop to tty1 and kill whatever I’m playing before I can ctrl-alt-f7 back to GDM.
So yeah, I’m sick of being on the leading edge, and also a little sick of Ubuntu’s unwillingness to delay releases for QA. I’m going back.
Although I really like the Transmission app. Very nice.
[...] you ever read my frustrated little post and feel I was unfairly slagging you and your xrandr GUI, I assure you I was not. In fact, if you [...]
Hey Daniel, I feel your pain.
I have a laptop and had my external 21″ has the second monitor. Since the upgrade it no longer works and no one seems to know why! I suspect the nvidia drivers are broken because as you mentioned the problem is at the detection stage, or rather the lack of it!
I tried displayconfig-gtk and it did see a second generic monitor but after restarting x the monitor still remains with “no signal”. Arghh, how frustrating.
This is I think a massive issue and I’m hoping that it’s being given the priority that it deserves. The driver for my network card a also broken due to wrong detection. So I had no internet to fix it but that’s another story.
Keep us updated case you find solution to getting the monitors detected.
[...] wrong. Turns out that the X subsystem has been completely changed in Heron and for anything more complicated than a simple dual-monitor setup, things just don’t work. Rotation in particular seems to be a problem that’s been carried over from Gibbon. In [...]
Hi,
i got the same problem after upgrading to Hardy: MetaModes in the xconf didn’t work as intended.
The more interesting thing is, with nvidia-settings i can create the missing MetaModes. My games see them and work! (UT & Q4).
Unfortunately i’ve not a way to create this with a nvidia-settings commandline parameter :-/
Perhaps i find enough time to look into the source code ..
So, how much time have you wasted dealing with Ubuntu so far? Have you ever bothered to calculate how much that would be in dollar terms were your time worth minimum wage? I’m guessing that the value far exceeds the cost of a copy of Mac OS X…
Oh, I’m sure if I were to assign a dollar figure to my spare time it would probably exceed a copy of Mac OS X. Of course that more than a bit disingenuous because I’d have to include the Mac hardware at the Mac hardware premium.
But let’s say, just for kicks, that my spare time is worth minimum wage. Even though it isn’t, and nobody really assigns a value to their spare time (otherwise they’d spend it working, not reading books and watching TV and whatever else).
I figure I’ve spend about twenty or thirty hours just tooling around with Ubuntu. At minimum wage, which is somewhere around $10 in Canada, that’s something like $300. But let’s just say for the sake of argument that it’s more like one hundred hours and $1000.00 and that there’s no income tax on it or anything like that.
I have three computers running Ubuntu, two of which are commodity hardware that I got for free. I use them (respectively) as a surround-sound jukebox for my and my wife’s bedroom, and a media PC for my television (it plays DVDs, streams television, views YouTube, etc).
I got both these computers for free because they’re old and only worth $50 or something a piece. But they work well with Ubuntu and have both been rock solid over their lifetimes. From perusing Craigslist, I’m under the impression that a Macintosh with similar capabilities would run me around $200.00.
So I’m about $400 ahead.
Add to that my commodity PC which I bought without Windows, which cost me $1500.00 (dual graphics cards and all) about a year ago. A similar Macintosh (not that I was able to find one with dual video cards, mind you) would run me, going back in time, something in the range of $2500.00.
Now I’m $1400.00 ahead.
Then I’d have to buy all the equivalent software that doesn’t run on a Mac but does run on Ubuntu. So add on another $200.00 or so just for software.
Now I’m $1600.00 ahead.
So even with the grossly exaggerated one hundred hours and $1000.00 on my time, I’m $600.00 ahead of the Mac OS X route.
You can even count in the time it took me to write this really, really long comment.
But in the end none of that matters. I like Ubuntu because I love to tinker. I love to fool around with software and break things and fix them and watch Linux develop into a world-class desktop operating system.
I dislike having my computer usage dictated by the manufacturer. My wife runs OS X. It’s pretty nice. I fix Windows for a living at work. I’ve chosen the third way because it’s exactly want I want: mine to do with what I wish. Money is only a secondary consideration.
dan
FREETARD! ;)
Ehhh, I’m an Apple fanboy, and I think that it’s fine that you use Ubuntu. Whatever makes you happy, man.