Good news for those of us screwed over by Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).
After filing a bug or two on Launchpad I finally got filled in on why my setup is currently so horribly broken.
The long and short of the matter is this: The old Twinview/Xinerama regime is gone and done away with. They are a thing of the past, a legacy hack that had to be thrown out at some point to make way for the new and shiny xrandr.
The reason is that Xinerama doesn’t allow you to do things any sane operating system should be able to do, like hotplug monitors and projectors. Xrandr does support those things. However, it doesn’t right now support more than than dual-head setups, which is apparently the most prevalent use case out there right now.
Multiple cards and more than two monitors are in the works, and though xrandr can’t handle them right now, it will be able to in the future, perhaps even in Hardy+1.
Bottom line: If your setup includes more than two monitors running off one card, you’re screwed. Stick with 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) until you hear it’s safe to upgrade. So that’s the good/bad news.
For myself, I’m a little less infuriated now that I understand the issue a bit more. I’d urge the Ubuntu developers, though, to disclose these things a little more openly in the future. If there are going to be serious regressions, if something isn’t going to work that worked in the previous version, let me know. It’ll save me the trouble of upgrading and downgrading and a lot of shouting curses at the developers I can name. Plus, not everything is always going to be sunshine and daffodils with every release; of course things are going to change, sometimes taking a step backwards to take two steps forward, but at least let me know before hand. There’s a distinct dearth of information regarding any of the problems I’ve had, at least that I could find.
Tags: hardyheron, Ubuntu, x.org
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April 28th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
[...] Don’t read this. It’s just an angry rant. Read this instead, as it has actual information in [...]
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:48 am
Ack. But I’ve already upgraded. Although I know I should have read up on things ahead of time, seriously now, this is a pretty damn serious regression and I’m not particularly impressed.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:09 am
I know. I noted this in my bug report. I couldn’t find any pre-release information about this save that there was a new version of the X server that depended on xrandr over and above xinerama/Twinview.
I think the release notes should outline any functionality regressions that the user might experience during upgrading. For instance, running anything more than 2 monitors and 1 graphics card. Or flashplugin-nonfree not necessarily working with PulseAudio. Or PulseAudio not really working with most non-default Gnome apps. Or the “perfect setup” from the upstream PulseAudio developers working a hell of a lot better than the current Ubuntu 8.04 setup.
I know both the xrandr (a hard to type command too!) and PulseAudio integration are steps backwards that had to be taken at some point in order to fix the screwed up X server and sound server situation that makes running Ubuntu a bit of a joke in some situations. But for a LTS where I’m expecting stability over and above new features? Not the best time to deploy major features and major breakage.
Flash not working with PulseAudio by default is a serious showstopper, for instance. There’s a bug report on this going all the way back to the Hardy Alpha… this isn’t something people don’t know about. There’s a solution that Fedora came up with involving the use of nswrapper for the Flash plugin that works for them — they went through all the PulseAudio pain a lot earlier that Ubuntu after all. There are some lessons to be learned here, I think.