Sidux 2009-4 success: A little help from Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 goes a long way

I'll get to Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 later, but the "safe graphics mode" boot option in that very Ubuntu live DVD helped me figure out how to get Sidux 2009-04 to boot on my Intel 82830 CGC (aka Intel 830m) graphics-running Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

Over the course of two computing sessions I experienced both the Alpha 2 of the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release as well as the Sidux take on Debian Sid, circa early last year, both of which I've wanted to do in order to "plan" this laptop's future when I decide to leave Debian Lenny behind.

To be brief, the answer to all of my video problems can be summed up thusly:

VESA

Yep, the VESA driver seems to be the ticket to getting X to run in the post-Lenny world.

That's what Ubuntu uses for "safe graphics mode," and my ability to boot into Lucid Alpha 2 with that boot parameter led me to reverse my earlier failure with Sidux.

The good news is that with the boot parameter xdriver=vesa I'm able to boot and run Sidux, its 2.6.32.2 kernel, X.org 7.4 and KDE 4.3.4 desktop, the latter of which is quite snappy and doesn't offend me as much as it might a hard-core KDE 3.x user, which I'm definitely not (and at this point in time I can safely say I like KDE 4.3 much better than 3.x).

I probably shouldn't compare Sidux 2009-4 to Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, but at this point I should just get that out of the way by saying that Sidux, being pretty much Debian Sid, is quite a bit snappier than Ubuntu Lucid at this point in the development.

The problem with both Sidux 2009-4 and Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 at this point in time on this specific hardware is that a number of minutes into the session, say 10 minutes, the mouse only "half" works. By "half" I mean the arrow/cursor appears on the screen and it moves when the mouse is moved. But neither the right- or left-click buttons works. Yep, you can move your pointer but can't click on anything. Even the little mouse wheel works. But again, no clicking is very bad.

Sort of makes X less than useful.

Once again, DAMN XORG ...

I've never had to use the VESA driver before, but I must say that the display looks great, probably refreshes faster than using the Intel drivers in Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Hardy through Karmic ... but not having a working mouse is really, really inconvenient.

The fact that both Sidux 2009-4 and Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 share this "bug," says to me that the trouble is upstream. I'll have to start checking the bug reports for everything from Xorg to the kernel itself to see just what the hell is going on.

Other than this showstopping bug, everything else in Sidux 2009-04, especially KDE 4.3, is pretty darn nice.

(Point of order: Most of this entry was composed in the Sidux 2009-04 live environment ... until the mouse died; I returned to finish it up in the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 live environment.)

More on Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 coming up ...