installing ubuntu and bad video and my experiences

[Wagner, Steven G]

Damn, you could run Gentoo for the same about of tweaking, maybe less!
Opensuse 10.1 went on my laptop smooth as silk, no problems whatsoever.
Great distro, IMHO.

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us]On Behalf Of Jeremy C.
Reed
Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2006 7:41 PM
To: plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Subject: installing ubuntu and bad video and my experiences


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

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