Zoont Foomby wrote:
Hi all, I've been running Debian unstable on my Thinkpad X31 laptop for almost two years. In general it works great. I use the Radeon mobility card in it to provide a dual-head setup when I am at my desk. This has been working fine, until today. I couldn't leave good enough alone, and did an update to the xserver-xorg package, and related packages. I hadn't updated in a couple of months. After this update, when Xorg starts, it will not display any image on my laptop's LCD panel if the external monitor is plugged in. I did not change anything in my hardware setup, so this is purely a software issue - since it worked great before. I checked my xorg.conf file, and it is exactly the same as it was before - it did not get updated .. so my configuration is the same as well. Anyway, I had backups, so I wasn't in danger of losing the conf files. If my hardware is the same, and the configuration file is the same, then I am lead to believe that the software update has introduced a bug.
[...]
1) Is there any way to revert to the previous software version easily? I don't know exactly what number I was at, so would need a way to step back through various versions... The current version of the package 'xserver-xorg' is '6.9.0.dfsg'
I do not use ATI cards myself, but from following this list I got the
impression that a number of people have problems with ATI cards and Xorg
6.9. You could try to go back to version 6.8, either by looking in your
/var/cache/apt/archives for the last 6.8 package you have there, or by
going to snapshot.debian.net. I don't know how easy it will be to
downgrade Xorg consistently since downgrades are not really supported by
the Debian package management system.
Another thing to try might be to replace only the radeon driver with its
older version. (If that is the driver you are using.) You could find the
last xserver-xorg_6.8 package in /var/cache/apt/archives and use
dpkg-deb to extract its contents to some temporary directory. Then you
could replace /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so with the file
from Xorg 6.8. I am not too optimistic about this, though, since I would
expect that Xorg has some sort of version checking implemented.
Therefore, if you decide to try this, make sure that you keep a backup
copy of the 6.9 driver around to restore it if necessary.
Maybe an ATI user on this list knows how to reactivate your dual display
without reverting to Xorg 6.8. That would of course be the best solution.
Regards,
Florian