[ale] Ubuntu 9.10, Thinkpad T30 Display Issues

[Brian Pitts]

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.

Did you make sure "Desktop Effects" are disabled in
System->Preferences->Appearance?

> 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.

Run Xorg -configure to generate one.

> Another issue, just for completeness, include not being  
> able to interrupt the boot process to instruct grub to boot  
> into recovery mode.

You should be able to hit escape to enter the grub menu during boot.

> 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.
> Anybody got a clue or seven that they would like to share?  

Ubuntu has switched from legacy GRUB to GRUB 2. This confused the heck
out of me too when I first tried to configure it. The wiki [0] should
point you in the right direction.

[0] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts