Intel 82830 CGC (830m) graphics fix for Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 just might work for your Intel video chip, too

Me and Xorg. It's a long, dramatic tale.

OK, it's not so much me and Xorg as it is my Intel 830m graphics chip and Xorg, or more specifically my Intel 82830 CGC and Xorg.

Whatever you title this epic — and make no mistake, this is epic, let me preface this by saying the c%$ I've been through since the days Debian Lenny was in Testing is something I wouldn't wish on any other user.

If you want to read every sordid detail, start with my three-part series, or just read my fix for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

Long story short, I've managed to get my Intel 830m laptops (yes, I do have more than one) to run in Debian Lenny and all the Ubuntus from 8.04 through 9.10 with the various methods detailed in the posts above.

There are two ways to go about this. One involves hacking into xorg.conf to make the display work. The other involves disabling kernel mode setting.

In Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Alpha 2, which I've been testing with a live DVD, there are two ways to boot the disc and get actual video.

The first is booting in "Safe Graphics Mode," which invokes the VESA driver.

The second is something that worked for me in at the beginning of the 9.10 era, which I didn't need later but now seem to need again in 10.04. And that is disabling kernel mode setting.

Both of these methods work, but I prefer the second, disabling kernel mode setting, because a) you're not using the VESA driver and b) you are running X without an xorg.conf file, which is something I quite like to do (and have done in OpenBSD and a few Ubuntu releases).

To run in Safe Graphics Mode, once you boot the Ubuntu Lucid DVD, click F4 for the various "modes," and select "safe graphics mode." Then click Enter to either "Try Ubuntu Without Installing."

You will boot into Ubuntu Lucid, and the system will create an xorg.conf file that calls the VESA driver.

It looks good. It is good. I don't think you'll be able to get Compiz, but I couldn't get it with my other method either. I've been able to use Compiz before on this hardware, but I always disable it anyway because all that wobbling and sliding makes me nauseous (literally).

I prefer the second method, disabling kernel mode setting. I wrote up this hack for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, and it works here just as well.

Here's what you do:

You need to get to the Boot Options line. Do that by hitting F6 (Other Options). Don't actually choose one of the options presented. Instead, click your Esc key. The Boot Options line should appear just above the F1 through F6 line at the bottom of the screen.

To access that Boot Options line, just hit one of your arrow keys, and your cursor should appear. At the end of the Boot Options line — after quiet splash — enter the following:

i915.modeset=0

Then click the Enter key to boot into the Ubuntu 10.04 live environment.

If this works for you the way it works for me, you'll soon be in the Ubuntu desktop, and if you open a terminal and run:

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf

You'll see that you don't have an xorg.conf, but you're in X. And it works. I like that.

I tried to turn on Compiz just to see if I could, but it didn't work.

If turning off kernel mode setting works for you in the live Ubuntu 10.04 environment, what do you do if you want to actually install Ubuntu? How do you turn off kernel mode setting permanently?

(Remember that while I initially needed to turn off kernel mode setting in Ubuntu 9.10, at some point in the update cycle I was able to turn it back on ... before I started having more trouble with X, prompting me to retreat to Debian Lenny, which I'm running on my main laptop right now.

Ubuntu 10.04 is only in the alpha stage now. This issue might be "fixed" by release time in April of this year. Or not. But you can always try this hack if you have trouble.

I'd love to tell you how to make this kernel mode setting fix so the GRUB bootloader will turn it off every time you boot into Ubuntu, but I can't. GRUB has "moved on" to GRUB 2, and it no longer works the same way as the GRUB I've been hacking into for three years now.

And now I'm hearing that GRUB 2 isn't quite ready for production from a security standpoint.

Update: Here's a pretty good tutorial on working with GRUB 2.

I did a little checking around — and I encourage any of you to do the same, since I'm not running GRUB 2 on an actual install — and it looks like you can add boot parameters in /etc/default/grub, then run update-grub to update /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

It looks like the line in /etc/default/grub with "quiet splash" in it could be appended with i915.modeset=0, and after saving it, you run update-grub, and then you should be good to reboot.

Again, I don't have Ubuntu 10.04 installed on any boxes, so I'm speculating here.

If I'm correct (and I'd love confirmation):

You open a terminal and use sudo to accomplish this (with your favorite text editor; I'd use vi or nano, but I'll use Gedit here because I imagine the average Ubuntu user is plenty comfortable with it):

$ sudo gedit /etc/default/grub &

Then when you're in the file, change this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to look like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.modeset=0"

Save the file in Gedit and close the window.

Then run this command:

$ sudo update-grub

You should now be able to reboot the machine and have GRUB turn off kernel mode setting automatically. If not, I imagine there's a way to edit your boot line "on the fly" like there is now with the "old" GRUB. (Again, if anybody has installed Ubuntu 10.04 and can confirm this, I'd really appreciate it).

My initial impression of GRUB 2: I like the idea of GRUB 2's configuration files being in /etc instead of in /boot/grub. It makes it easier to keep backups, and if you kill the bootloader (as I have on many an occasion) with a dual-boot install, you'll still have your configuration, or so I think.

Hello LTS: Disabling kernel mode setting worked for me in the early 9.10 era, and at some point either a kernel or Xorg update made it so I no longer needed it. Now it seems that I need it again to make Intel 830m (82830 CGC) video work. Whatever. If disabling kernel mode setting makes Ubuntu 10.04 work, I've just bought three more years (Lucid is a long-term-support release) of security updates in an OS that I like a whole lot.

What about Squeeze? Does Debian Squeeze use kernel mode setting? I ask because I had the same problem in Sidux 2009-04 (which I used to peek in a live-disc kind of way into what Squeeze might be like), and the Vesa driver came through for me there. At some point I'll try turning off kernel mode setting in Sidux and see what happens.

This kind of BS amounts to one thing and one thing only: New user repellent. If you haven't been hacking around with Xorg for years, and you're just thinking of trying Ubuntu and happen to have a laptop like mine — of which there are MILLIONS out there, Intel video being pretty darn ubiquitous — you're going to get a Ubuntu disc, try to boot it, get no video and wonder what all the fuss is about Linux since you can't even get to the desktop. It's a huge fail.

How could Ubuntu (or Debian, Slackware, Arch ...) solve this issue? During hardware detection, if the Intel 830m graphics chip comes up, use a script to turn off kernel mode setting (and if this hack works for any other graphics chips having this same trouble, include them in this "configuration" script). There's no reason why a very common graphics chip shouldn't work without resorting to the kind of hackery that's way, way above the pay grade of almost every new Ubuntu user.