[ale] Ubuntu 9.10, Thinkpad T30 Display Issues

[Thompson Freeman]

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.

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.
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