Actually, I manually reconfigured it by changing the PCI bus ID in the xorg.conf file. I never tried running dpkg-reconfigure. (I'm just lucky that I have a bit of inside knowledge about how to configure X.org.)
I content that the typical desktop user will not know anything about dpkg-reconfigure and will not even know enough to know where to start looking for the command. I'm a professional graphics chip designer, and I've been writing X11 drivers (for various UNIX platforms) for many years. But I'm new to Ubuntu and therefore had no idea where to start. I'm not, however, new to HCI and UI design, and what happened here violates basic principles. Moving a graphics card from one slot to another should be, to the user, functionally the same as plugging their USB flash drive into one USB port one day and then plugging the same one into another USB port the next day. There should be no logical difference. As engineers, we know there's a difference, but that's just an annoying technical one. Good software hides the bothersome, unnecessary, technically obvious (to the developer) details from the user. It is never sensible to silently fail (which is what happened--I ended up at a text console login prompt with no kind of error messages). Rather, when X11 fails to start, the user should be prompted with a report of the problem and some options as to what to do about it. Probably, it's bad to just reconfigure without authorization, so the menu seems that it should be required. The simplest thing would be to present a list of graphics cards that are in the system and ask which one they want to use. When they select one, xorg.conf should be modified appropriately. Another option for the user would be to ignore the error, so that the user can modify config files manually. Imagine what would happen if a corrupted filesystem required this sort of manual intervention. Ignoring the problem and silently failing would never be acceptable. -- Adding extra graphics cards; kubuntu won't start X11 https://launchpad.net/bugs/40398 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
