Monday, March 7, 2011

rotate vertically ati graphics driver on ubuntu 10.10

proprietary ati graphics driver on ubuntu 10.10 is quirky. It prevents ubuntu from booting back up if dual monitor is rotated vertically.

The following message pops up on reboot:
udevd-work[110]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: no such file or directory

Someone else had a similar problem
http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1524495

My solution was to boot with the monitors horizontally, make a backup copy of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Ubuntu boots up fine when the monitors are set to horizontal position. Once booted, manually rotate the monitor using the ATI Catalyst Control Center. When the system is rebooted in this configuration, the udevd-work error message will show up again and prevent the system from booting.
To boot the system again, boot into recovery mode, replace /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the good backup.
Reboot and the udevd-work error message will go away. Now you can boot and log in as usual and manually rotate the monitors