X failure after upgrade to Meerkat (Ubuntu 10.10)

[Bruce Labitt]

  On 10/17/2010 11:07 AM, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
> Bruce Labitt<bruce.labitt at myfairpoint.net>  writes:
>>
>>    Anyone know where the X stuff is hidden (umm, normally
>> stored) in Ubuntu so I can get X to work again?
>>
>> Context: 10.04 machine, freshly updated, then took the bait of going
>> to 10.10 last night.  (An auxilliary machine, nothing important on
>> it yet.  Trying to get koha running on it.)  During the upgrade,
>> there was a failure in downloading a chinese ttf font.  System
>> claimed to recover by running dpkg --config -a and said all was
>> ok. When it started for the first time I got the Ubuntu 10.10 splash
>> - then much churning, and finally dumping to console.  The error
>> that seemed to pop up was it could not find the nvidia driver.
>> Despite the obvious reasons why nvidia s*cks, why would 10.10 decide
>> to dump nvidia support? The video card in question is OLD, but it is
>> good enough.
>
> If it's that old, does Nvidia still actually support it?
>
> And does the driver that Xorg ships (Nouveau, in the
> xserver-xorg-video-nouveau package) not work?
>
>> So how does one start the X configuration again?  IIRC,
>> there used to be routines like xf86config, etc that could be
>> used to reconfig X.  All I need to is to get the screen
>> going again at some half decent resolution.  Eventually, it
>> would be nice to have something like 1600x1080 or so.
>
> Isn't /etc/X11/xorg.conf supposed to be basically empty
> on Ubuntu, these days, with everything autoconfigured?
> Just ensure that you have an applicable driver installed
> and it should work?
>
Old, in computer terms, is yesterday!  This card is OLD in 
the sense it only has 64M.  So probably 5 YO.

There really isn't anything in the xorg.conf file.  20-30 
lines, mostly blank.  Not like say 5 years ago, when there 
was tons of stuff there.

What is nouveau?  OK, found that.  This is an experimental 
driver...

My question, this is supposed to be an upgrade - not a new 
install.  So why didn't 'THEY' look at what was installed 
already, and use something that would actually work.  I'm 
really surprised that this happened.  I thought X problems 
were so yesterday, like GPF or BSOD...  Kind of 
disappointed, that's all.  Doesn't help get the distro more 
mainstream, IMHO.

Back on topic:  Things to try are?
1. rename xorg.conf
2. apt-get nouveau?
3. startx ?  or ?
4. how does one help x pick the right driver?  All automatic 
/ like gui only can s*ck...