10.04 video/display problems

[Henry Tillotson]

Hi ...

I've been using Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 on an HP Omnibook XE3 laptop with no
problems. I recently upgraded the memory (1GB) and hard disk (320GB), and
re-installed 9.10, and all was still OK.

Because 9.10 is no longer supported, I upgraded to 10.04 (lucid), and then
started getting intermittant problems:

- occasionally the screen stays blank when recovering from suspend or hibernate

- mouse pointer occasionally disappears

- display sometimes doesn't come back from (blank) screensaver

- the GL based screensavers all seem to cause the display to crash (and stay
   blank) after a second or two.

I've been looking for hints on google, and found a lot of discussion about
a year ago, at which time it appeared that people with older display chipsets
were getting similar problems when upgrading to 10.04 (my XE3 has the Intel
82830 CGC) ... suggestions given were to switch off KMS (kernel Mode Setting)
by specifying the GRUB option:

   i915.modeset=0

which didn't seem to make any difference for me: I found more documentation (on
the Ubuntu Wiki, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes) suggesting
that this is turned off by default for these older chipsets: I tried turning
it on with the GRUB option:

   i915.modeset=1

but this didn't help either.

I haven't seen any recent discussion of this, which makes me wonder if people
with these older machines have just given up ...

Is anyone else still getting this problem?

Is it likely to be resolved in the latest version 11.04?

or shall I give up and go back to 9.10? - I'd rather use a supported version
if possible...

cheers

henry