installing ubuntu and bad video and my experiences

[Jeremy C. Reed]

Just wanted to share my ubuntu experiences of yesterday and today...

On my laptop that doesn't support X vesa but does work with unichrome or 
openchrome's via, had garbage video with ubuntu.

It is a GQ (Great Quality) MX-3201 laptop (also known as a ECS G320 or 
Green320). The video is VIA Technologies VT8623 (Apollo CLE266) VGA. (I 
use it with X on FreeBSD and NetBSD and DragonFly fine. I assume it works 
with X on Linux too, but I will play with that later.)

First I tried ubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386.iso but got all garbage. Then I 
tried booting with vga=771 which helped at first but then the video was 
still bad.

So I used ubuntu-6.06-alternate-i386.iso. The video was bad, so I used 
vga=771.

I also had problems with CDs. I burned several Memorex CDRWs (INFODISC 
Technology Co., Ltd.). But some would fail at different places during the 
ubuntu install. Finally I burned a cheap Staples brand CD-R (Moser Baer 
India Limited) and that worked.

I could complete the installation. The installation probably took over an 
hour ... very slow.

The installer blew away my boot menu without asking about it first.

And when I reboot, I get garbage again!

The video is unreadable with slanted lines apparently where the text or 
graphics should be.

So I booted into the rescue mode and now have a shell prompt.

I have been using Debian for around nine years. And I have used ubuntu for 
maybe a year -- but always as a remote, console-based user.

I then used "update-rc.d -f gdm remove" and typed exit to leave single 
user mode.

Now I have a console.

Maybe I should have used the "server" ISO instead.

I am using Ubuntu as a development platform -- I am building a live CD 
for doing some automated hardware testing.

By the way, the default install is around 1870 MB with 1061 packages 
installed. It has around 45 processes running by default (and I am not 
using X), and about 45 MB of real memory is being used (not including 
buffers or disk cache).

 Jeremy C. Reed