[ale] Ubuntu 9.10, Thinkpad T30 Display Issues

[Scott Castaline]

On 11/30/2009 08:07 AM, Thompson Freeman wrote:
>
> I'll try to keep this more coherent than some of my efforts.
>
> I have an IBM ThinkPad T30 which I upgraded from Ubuntu9.04
> to 9.10 over the weekend with less than stellar results for
> the display. The default settings are unusable, with just
> about every weird symptom I've ever seen: random screen
> hash, ghost images, apparent lockup, and I'm not sure what.
> I can login with gnome-safe and have a working display, but
> no network support. Or I can downgrade the display to a
> lower resolution of 600x800 (I think) and get a mostly
> working display with just some artifacts left when a window
> gets dragged around.
>
> A pair of Google sessions so far has suggested that the
> video adaptor on the T30 lacks the video memory to handle
> the modern desktop. The suggestion I've seen is to down
> grade to a lower color depth, but I've not been able to do
> so myself due to not finding any xorg.conf file.

On Fedora you would download system-display-config, then run it from a 
terminal. This will create a xorg.conf file in the usual location 
(/etc/X11). From there you should be able to sudo 
<editor-of-your-choice>, once done, you'll have to log out and back in 
again to restart xserver.
>
> Another issue, just for completeness, include not being
> able to interrupt the boot process to instruct grub to boot
> into recovery mode. Looking in /boot/grub I see a boatload
> of files, but no /boot/grub/menu.1st or other configuration
> file that I recognize to set a time out value.
If memory serves me correctly ubuntu used to use another file that was a 
symbolic link to menu.lst located somewhere else, I think in /boot 
instead of /boot/grub. It's been a while since I've run Ubuntu.

> Anybody got a clue or seven that they would like to share?
> No hurry. I've got to put together a test and lecture so
> I'm not working on this challenge until tonight at least.
> Just wanted to get started...
>
> Thanks in advance
>
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