ph-lee

The problem: ubuntu media centre that hooks up to an old TV which takes S-video. Graphics card or ubuntu isn’t capable of automatically detecting the TV.

The solution: [Bernades] has an article on how to get ubuntu to detect the tv and output it using XRandR.

xrandr --output S-video --set load_detection 1

xrandr --output S-video --auto

The problem is that this isn’t persistent and as soon as you reboot you’ll be back to square one.

[Ubuntu wiki] shows a script can be setup to run the above lines of code on startup. So in my case of using kde add the above lines of code to the following file.

/etc/kde4/kdm/Xsetup

Give your a box a reboot and your linux media centre should be configured to use your TV.

I spent today upgrading ubuntu from 9.04 ( Jaunty Jackalope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). However upon restarting GRUB loads and the kubuntu load progress bar screen loads. This is then followed by a blank black screen. At first I thought the upgraded had completely flattened my machine!

The first step is to get yourself to a console where you can actually do some stuff. So do a restart and when you see the GRUB loaded screen hit ESC. You can then boot into recovery mode to get into a console.

To get KDE and Xserver to start we need to get rid of the old xorg.conf. [ubuntuforums.org]

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

This should now get you some graphics.

Next we need to install the missing ati drivers. [launchpad.net]

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

After this you’ll want to configure the driver with aticonfig and amdcccle.

Hopefully after a reboot this should fix the problem.