[ale] Ubuntu 9.10, Thinkpad T30 Display Issues

[tom]

Now this is awkward. Let me start out by thanking both Brian and
the other poster for their efforts. I got restarted on getting the
T30 fixed up today, and ran into an iteresting roadblock - the
stupid thing declines to boot anymore. Apparently that laptop was
a sick puppy...

A funeral for the late T30 will be held later at the recycle place,
and a R51 has been purchased to take it's place. The R51 has something
called Acronis on it which is supposed to help make backups of the
Windows XP (virus??) on it. One more thing to document I guess.

Anyway, to add just a little bit of information to what is added
below, the way to interupt a grub2 boot process is with the shift key,
not the escape like I was used to. Thanks to Brian I got that little
tidbit learned.

FWIW - I find this latest release of Ubuntu very visually appealing.

My thanks to the list for the use of their bandwidth.

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009, Brian Pitts wrote:

> 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
>
>