10.04 video/display problems

[Albert Wagner]

On 06/05/2011 11:57 AM, Henry Tillotson wrote:
> 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
>
I've had this problem also.  After installing/uninstalling propriety 
drivers it finally seems to be performing correctly again on an old Dell 
2400 running 10.10.  Apparently power management is a nightmare of 
spaghetti code that breaks for one user after fixing for another user.  
Like you, I only find advice from other users.  The people in charge are 
strangely silent.

> - 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 ...
No.  But I gave up on intel ever doing anything about it.  I caved and 
bought a nVidia chipped GeForce 8600. But that has it's own problems. I 
swear it's like going back to the 80's and 90's when only 6 out of ten 
of any product didn't last a year.  Now software is flakey and hardware 
is pretty stable.
>
> 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
>