Ubuntu Karmic settling in once again

It's not like I actually did anything, but my issues regarding my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop from the long-ago year 2001 and its Intel 82830 (aka 830m) video not working all that well in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) have mostly disappeared.

By that I mean when GNOME decides to turn on the screensaver, I'm able to get the video back to life with either a mouse movement or keyboard click (as opposed to the keyboard and mouse being dead to the world).

The trouble started with an Xorg update, but since then there have been at least two kernel updates, and perhaps one of those made everything all right.

Again (and I'm sure you're as tired of reading this as I am writing it), it's a) more than a little inconvenient to suffer through days or weeks of show-stopping regressions that make using Ubuntu rather, um, unpleasant, and b) just because a laptop and its hardware happens to be 8 years old doesn't mean that the Linux kernel and Xorg are in any way justified in eliminating support for said hardware.

Linux isn't just a latest-and-greatest-hardware OS. In fact, I'd say that it's anything but and probably runs on way more old hardware than it does new.

And this is INTEL video. Remember -- one of the few companies that open-sources its drivers (at least as far as I know; and if not, I'd love to be corrected)?

Just because your year-old Dell/Thinkpad/whatever works great, don't jeopardize Linux's present and future with regressions that make perfectly usable hardware either more difficult or borderline impossible to use.

My rant is done.