<SOLVED> Screen login/logout issues Intel 845G (i915 driver)

[QuarkDS9]

Here's an interesting situation to say the least. To give some background I recently installed Linux Mint 13 XFCE (32 bit) on my girlfriends *OLD* Seanix P4 2.4ghz machine with 1 gig ram and a 70gb hard drive that was built back in May of 2003. Also did a kernal upgrade recently to 3.6.3 as outlined in http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/10/install-linux-kernel-363-in-ubuntu.html

I discovered afterwards that I kept having random lockups with massive screen garbage then my 2D acceleration on the desktop would be disabled (even moving application windows would be painfully slow) along with playing videos in any kind of multimedia player such as VLC or SMPlayer (frontend for mplayer) would not work at all. After doing some more digging on this machine I find what kind of integrated gpu this machine has.

*Note this may be a bit of explanations and code posting so bear with me*

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lspci -v | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])


So ok fine I figure it was a driver issue so I tried two alternate intel drivers I found on the net which are

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ppa:glasen/intel-driver
ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers


I still had the same lockup issue with both drivers. I purged both drivers and went back to the drivers Mint 13 came with and even tried a modified "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" file along with installing updated "xserver-xorg-video-intel" and "libdrm-intel1".

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Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Shadow" "true"
Option "DRI" "false"
BoardName "Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection


That didn't fix anything either and apparantly the option "Shadow" is not even supported anymore. I had also tried disabling KMS support with the intel driver via "/etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf" with modeset=0 and changing the driver line of xorg.conf to "Vesa" instead of "Intel" obviousely.

Rebooted to find that the X11 crashed quite wonderfully and that apparantly the intel driver ignores turning off modeset with "0". I ended up blacklisting the whole bloody mess of the i915 driver in "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf" and rebooted forcing Mint to use VESA or at least some sort of generic graphics driver. It works and at least it's more acceleration then the intel driver turning off the gpu. How did I know besides screen garbage I lost my 2D acceleration but not 3D opengl support? Easy... using

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grep 'WW\|EE' /var/log/Xorg.0.log

would reveal crap like

925.964] (EE) intel(0): Detected a hung GPU, disabling acceleration.
[   925.964] (EE) intel(0): When reporting this, please include i915_error_stat

And a variation would also sometimes be the GPU was wedged and hung as well


The only problem im having now is that if I logout I get a black screen yet I still hear the ding sound and I can blindly type in my user name and password then hit enter and the system tries to log back into the desktop but the screen still remains black. Is this perhaps something with the generic driver on Intel gpu's thats known already or is it something else that I might be able to fix to see my login screen again on logout with this generic driver?

What really is interesting too is if you look at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26345 there is apparantly already backport fixes for Debian Wheezy that solve the hardware issue with Intel 845g chipsets with the i915 driver but there will likely be a frosty chance in heck those backports will ever make it to Ubuntu for awhile at least *fingers crossed* unless there's some way to actually use debian wheezy backports with Mint without compromising my system bigtime.

Forgot to add a blog at http://prahladyeri.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/intel-graphic-cards-issue/ mentioned the VESA idea I tried along with using two different acceleration methods with the intel driver none of which helped. And he too mentions those backports from Debian fixing it... (/facepalm)

[stratus_ss]

Any particular reason, if you need a debian back port, that you dont just use LMDE?

[QuarkDS9]

Any particular reason, if you need a debian back port, that you dont just use LMDE?

I actually tried LMDE not too long ago via a live cd and I didn't like it nearly as much as LMKDE and LMXFCE to say the least. At any rate all I can do is hope maybe those fixes will one day appear for Ubuntu and LM but more so I'm curious about the screen going black if I logout and not coming back. Yet oddly enough I can use "Lock Screen" from the menu just fine with no problems... weird.

[QuarkDS9]

If the forum admin or moderator will be so kind as to perhaps close this thread it would be appreciated. Seeing as I won't be able to get a new computer for awhile and the issues with Intel 845G chipset in Linux I've decided (painfully) to go back to Windows where there isn't any acceleration issues.

[xenopeek]

Sorry to read about the issue. You can close topics by editing the first post in a topic (see the little edit button in the top right of the post), and changing the subject to add the word <SOLVED>.