Recently in Squeeze Category

X died on me today. For the uninitiated, I mean the graphical environment -- the GUI, if you will.

The cursor moved, but the mouse and keyboard otherwise had no effect. I'm running Debian Squeeze with the default GNOME desktop environment.

While the keyboard couldn't do anything on the desktop, I was, however, able to open a virtual console with ctrl-alt-F2.

I logged in, ran the top utility to find out what processes, if any, were going awry. All looked OK, but I still had no functionality in the GUI.

I noted the PID -- aka the process ID number -- of Xorg, the underpinnings of the GUI itself.

Then, using my rootly privileges (you can either su to root or use sudo, the latter of which I generally choose), I did the following:

$ sudo kill -9 xxxx

In this case, xxxx is the PID, a four-digit number in my particular case.

I was immediately returned to the Debian GNU/Linux login screen, which is run by the GDM display manager.

I logged in and all was (and is) fine.

Saw this on Distrowatch Weekly: The Debian Live project has released live DVD images for Squeeze Alpha 1.

The images are all 1 GB + (except for the Rescue and Standard versions), so that's a bit of a change from the Lenny era. You'll need to use a DVD. Due to my Toshiba's hatred of CD-R but surprising love of DVD+R, I've been burning everything, including CD images, onto DVD, and it's worked quite well.

There are ISOs for GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce, as well as the aforementioned Rescue and Standard (no GUI for both) spins.

One thing that's very notable: There are PowerPC images this time. I remember there most decidedly NOT being PowerPC live Debian CDs for Lenny, and a check of the download area for live Lenny confirms this.

I've written many times about how well Debian Etch runs on my Mac G4/466, and to see more of a commitment to PowerPC rather than less (or none) is a very good thing indeed. I never had much luck with Ubuntu on PowerPC back when it was an official port (the 6.06-7.04 era, if I recall correctly; there are community ports to PowerPC still active, but I've never tried them - Debian is just too good on this hardware to think about using anything else).

Getting back to the live Squeeze images, I downloaded one yesterday and have yet to burn a DVD and give it a spin. For me, live images are practically a must. I need to explore as much hardware compatibility as I can before I commit to a new distribution/project for my operating system. Until now, I've been relying on the excellent Sidux 2009-04 as my main Debian live test environment. But I'm always glad to have alternatives, especially ones that are pure Debian.

I can also report that the current builds of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid are running well on my Toshiba and Gateway laptops (both Intel 830m chipsets) if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the bootline.

And now that I know you can pause the invisible Grub2 menu in an installed Ubuntu Lucid desktop by holding down the Shift key during the beginning of the boot, I know that I can boot into the new installation and fix Grub2 permanently to keep nomodeset in the boot line.

I remain addicted to speed - desktop speed, if you need clarification on what I mean. And Debian is all about that, a bit moreso than Ubuntu. And it's something you can definitely feel on older hardware.

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu can be made as fast as Debian, but some tweaking is involved. Not to say Ubuntu is a dog or anything, because it most assuredly is not, but Debian and Slackware especially tend to maximize the power you have in your hardware.

Coincidentally, the system I'm running right now - FreeBSD 7.3-release - is extremely quick as well. More on that later.

Can you install Debian with the live image? I'm not sure you can. There is some talk about modifying the running live system to invoke the installer, but it looks like you're better off grabbing a Squeeze image and creating a real Debian install disc, whether it be the first full CD, a DVD or even Blu-ray image, or a much-smaller network-install or business-card install image (the latter two which I favor, since the newest packages are pulled from the repository and you don't need to do a massive update right out of the box).

As I've reported in too much detail, my Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade didn't go too well. I'm hoping migration issues are fixed by the time Squeeze goes Stable, but at the moment I'm recommending such an in-place upgrade unless you've done a lot of homework as to exactly how to do it. Clearly I haven't done said homework, and that's why I'm not running Debian at this moment.

I put a lot of stock on the ability to do an in-place upgrade of my Linux/Unix desktops. And regarding upgrades from one distribution to another, Debian is supposedly one of the best.

You always hear about those hard-core geeks who have been running the same box since Potato, dist-upgrading all the way to whatever the current stable or testing distribution is at any given moment.

I've upgraded a stable Debian system to testing maybe once or twice, usually in short order (i.e. installing stable and immediately upgrading to testing).

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my "production" Debian laptop, which I've been using heavily since late last year, from Lenny (stable) to Squeeze (testing). I thought it would be smooth and easy.

Not so much.

I've finally got most things working. I'm still having the kind of sound problems that plagued me in the Ubuntu 8.04 era (Flash and the rest of the system fighting for dominance), but I've overcome quite a bit.

I did have backups of my user data, so if things went totally south, I was covered.

I guess I've had more elaborate setups than this, particularly in OpenBSD, where there's a whole lot of configuration needed.

In reality, I've kept my Lenny install fairly vanilla. I only have GNOME. Never added Xfce, Fluxbox or KDE. I pretty much stick with the GNOME apps. The Epiphany browser is one of my favorite apps. I use Rhythmbox. I have gFTP, but lately I've been using Nautilus' FTP capability more and more.

I do use Thunderbird instead of Evolution, and I have a ton of POP mail on the box.

Recently I added Wine via Bordeaux and have been running the free-as-in-beer Windows image viewer/editor IrfanView (although I'm about to cease needing it for the very specific IPTC-manipulating feature for which I cling to it).

But otherwise it's pretty standard. And I did have that backup.

I had what I thought was enough disk space (1 GB +) in my root partition (I have / and /home in encrypted LVM).

First I made sure Lenny was up to date. Then I changed my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Squeeze repos instead of Lenny.

Then I did a dist-upgrade with apt. Everything seemed to be going OK. Until the udev problem cropped up. Had I seen the page in this link before I started, I might've saved myself a whole lot of trouble.

I didn't know what udev was. The Debian package page has a nice description:

udev is a daemon which dynamically creates and removes device nodes from /dev/, handles hotplug events and loads drivers at boot time.

It seems that the udev in Squeeze requires a newer kernel than the one in Lenny, yet that kernel either doesn't install before udev, or you have to be actually running that new kernel before doing the full upgrade. There's even a fairly uhelpful bug report.

At any rate, I couldn't quite figure out what to do. I ran a few more dist-upgrades and eventually did reboot into the new kernel for Squeeze and redid the dist-upgrade.

In case you were wondering (and I knew you were), I did run out of disk space. I managed to clear apt's cache and get a bit further on the upgrade.

For some reason, X was gone. I used apt to reinstall xorg, which brought the GUI back.

X performance was terrible for awhile. Not sure why, but xorg was eating most of the CPU for quite some time. I tried a few xorg.conf files, but nothing really helped.

At one point, in the flurry of error messages, it was suggested in the terminal that I run apt-get autoclean.

I did that, and that removed a whole lot of packages, a few of which I still needed.

Eventually I added back the bits of GNOME that were missing. I had sound problems, so (cue horrific scream) I actually installed PulseAudio in an attempt to restore some order to the system. I think the GNOME bits did more, but I do have most of my sound capability back.

I was able to get sound in Flash video in the browser, but then Totem kept crashing, so I pulled that and tweaked my account a bit.

I would get specific here with what I did, but truthfully none of it is working well enough for me to do that.

So I have sound in applications, I don't have sound in the Flash plugin, but I do have sound in .flv files on the local drive, as well as in other video and audio.

And from what I understand, "system sounds" in GNOME are broken for all of Squeeze until some package or other is released into the distribution.

I was more troubled than anything by X eating all that CPU. Again, I think adding some GNOME bits (I even had to reinstall GDM) solved that problem.

Right now Pidgin is refusing to connect to my AIM account, saying I've logged in and out too many times in succession.

BEFORE YOU SAY, 'THIS IS TESTING; DON'T RUN IT IF YOU DON'T WANT TROUBLE,' LET ME SAY THAT I HEAR YOU. I've had trouble in Testing before, and I didn't expect not to have it again. I'm just reporting what happened.

Otherwise, everything seems to be working fine. I did have to tweak the config file to get my Ethernet interface managed under NetworkManager (just like I did in Ubuntu Jaunty/Karmic). Now that works great.

If I decide to stick with Squeeze, and I'm not saying I will, I probably will do a fresh install. I know I'm missing some GNOME bits that I might want or need. I've been adding stuff back as I run into trouble (I reinstalled gedit, the gnome screensaver app, which I needed to keep X from crashing when the gnome power management app tried to turn that feature on by itself).

I hope this upgrade process goes a whole lot more smoothly at such time as Squeeze gets its official Stable release. I'm somewhat confident about that happening.

So if you were smart and skipped to the end, my Squeeze system is running fairly well at present, and I could very well stick with it. The biggest problem I'm having is with sound (and my USB Headphone Set sound module).

One thing I discovered was the YouTube plugin for Totem. All you do is activate it, and you can search for YouTube videos by keyword and then play the h.264 version in Totem. With sound. That's really cool.

I've got enough things working that I'm going to stick with Squeeze at least until Ubuntu Lucid is released late next month. As I wrote recently, I did try a daily build of Lucid in the live environment, and everything appeared to be working. The purple-Mac theme didn't really bother me. I'll have to do some multimedia tests: I never could get my 3gp cellphone videos to play with sound in Ubuntu (and they still work in Debian).

I could also do a clean install of Debian Lenny. I'm not ruling that out at all. I kept this laptop fairly stock (and tried to keep good notes on what I did) so I could re-create Debian Lenny on it if necessary. One way or the other, I will be reinstalling something on this laptop, be it Lenny, Squeeze or "other."

I can't say that I expected the dist-upgrade to Squeeze to go smoothly. I guess I hoped it would.

I thought to myself, "You should've used a detailed Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade guide on the Web before doing this." I still haven't found one. If you have, please let me know.

I've been waiting. And while I don't generally recommend an in-place upgrade of a production machine, especially one with problematic hardware (in my case that "problematic" bit being the Intel 830m chipset and its 82830 CGC graphics controller) and a fully encrypted hard drive, I do have unencrypted backups, and I'm ready to leave Debian Lenny behind and see how well Squeeze does on my machine and for my tasks.

So I did the prep, did an update/upgrade in Lenny, changed my sources.list, did another update in Squeeze, and I'm running the dist-upgrade now, pulling in some 900+ packages and hoping the thing will boot when its all done.

Yes, I have the day off. Thus I have the machine free for just such an upgrade.

And yes, this is the sort of thing I do on my day off. Take it up with my therapist.

I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with "older" Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn't even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up.

Today I decided to download and burn the daily build ISO of Lucid for March 15.

I booted it, hit Escape as soon as the first screen came up (that's a new one, having to do that), then hit F6 for Modes, arrowed down to nomodeset, hit Enter to select it, then Escape, then Enter again to boot ...

And a short time later I was in the less-brown-more-purple world of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid!

Never mind that it's ... purple.

It works! Video is perfect on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with the Intel 830m chipset.

Whatever wasn't working for me in Alpha 3 has been fixed at the time of this daily build.

I'd like to thank any and all developers who were able to make this happen, and I'd also like to let the rest of the Intel 830m-using community know that the following WILL work if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the boot line:

Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 (as of this 3/15/10 daily build)
Fedora 12
Sidux 2009-04

I have an alpha image of Fedora 13 but haven't yet burned it, and I have heard that Slackware 13 runs with no problem.

So the future for the older-Intel-video-using world is looking a whole lot brighter than it did a few short weeks again.

At this point I have no comment on purple or the window buttons moving from the right side of the window to the left. I have no comment because I DON'T CARE. I HAVE WORKING VIDEO AND THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS AT PRESENT.

I'll address purple and window buttons at a later time. One thing I can say for sure is that this ain't the usual orange/brown.

Before I go, I've been testing Firefox 3.6 on the Mac OS X and Windows XP platforms, and this instance of Ubuntu Lucid is the first time I'm seeing FF 3.6 in Linux.

My first impressions are that not much is different in the PowerPC build for OS X, but I'm seeing huge improvements in the browsing experience in terms of speed in both Windows and Linux.

I can't say for sure, but I think it all boils down to a faster Javascript engine in 3.6 vs. 3.0 (and also 3.5 perhaps).

Getting back to Intel 830m for the moment, this means I'm upgrading my Debian Lenny laptop to Squeeze as soon as possible.

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication.

I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux. Both ZaReason and System 76 are building small boxes around the Intel Atom/Nvidia platform, some single core, others dual core — and I do recommend the latter.

The one stopping point for me, other than money, is that I'm not sure whether or not these pre-built boxes have CPU fans or use passive cooling from massive heatsinks. For years now I've been leaning toward machines with no spinning fans either in the box itself (on the CPU or elsewhere) or the power supply. With Logic Supply I can easily make this happen.

At ZaReason, the Ion Breeze 4220, starting at $399 for single-core, offers a variety of options, including the above-mentioned dual-core Ion CPU. I don't know if Earl, the ultra-accommodating chief technology officer at ZaReason, is offering the option of a fanless motherboard — I'll ask him.

System 76 offers its Meerkat Ion NetTop with dual-core Ion starting at $359.

One thing that ZaReason offers in the Ion Breeze that I like is an optional external fanless power supply.

I've been running my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client as a standalone Linux/BSD box almost since the beginning of my foray into open-source operating systems, with only a single fan blowing across the Mini-ITX motherboard and its heat-pipe-cooled CPU. The fan doesn't work when the box is upright, so for all intents and purposes this is a fanless computer, and I've never had a problem with thermal issues — in fact, it runs quite cool, if not quickly with its VIA C3 Samuel processor (that's supposed to be a 1 GHz model but for some reason only runs at 500 MHz), maximum of 256 MB RAM and woeful sound and video chips.

Right now the Maxspeed is running Debian Lenny from an 8 GB CF card inserted in the thin client's built-in CF-to-IDE interface. Yep, no spinning hard drives either.

System 76 does offer solid-state drives on the Meerkat Ion, starting at $110 extra for a 40 GB Intel drive.

If the Intel Atom Ion processor isn't what you're looking for, both System 76 and ZaReason have plenty of other desktop, laptop and server machines to look at.

The best thing about buying a computer from a shop that ships with Linux (in the case of these two retailers, Ubuntu) is that your hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work. You'll have audio, video, suspend/resume, all that stuff that sometimes is hard to get straight on the box that shipped to you with Windows.

In the times I've spoken with ZaReason's Earl, and the company will build, test and ship pretty much anything you want. They specialize in Ubuntu, but you can ask for a box to be loaded with Debian or CentOS, and I believe they'll do it.

Do ZaReason and System 76 charge more than your standard computer seller? Probably. You can't get the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel deals that are offered on the cover of the Office Depot circular, but those machines often do have bits of hardware that you'll tear your virtual hair out to get working properly.

When you get a machine from a company that specializes in Linux, not only will everything work, but you'll get support that will help you clear up any issues.

And for many people — and I'm getting more like this myself with less time available for banging-my-head-against-the-wall tinkering — it's worth a little extra money for somebody else to have figured out all the issues, or in the case of these companies, to choose hardware components that work well with free, open-source operating systems from the start.

And even if you are a tinkerer, chances are it ZaReason or System 76 have built you a machine, it won't just work well in Ubuntu but will be a great platform for other Linux distros you might want to run.

Not wanting to leave out BSD, you can get a pre-built and -loaded PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) laptop as well as two workstations (prices unknown) from IXsystems, the company behind PC-BSD. They seem to specialize in selling servers running FreeBSD and ask that interested buyers request a quote to receive pricing info. They're also offering CD and DVD sets of FreeBSD 8.0 if you don't want to bother downloading the ISOs and burning your own discs.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything, I've been giving FreeBSD a lot more thought lately. I've run OpenBSD on the desktop as my primary system for about six months, and I'm considering FreeBSD instead for a future test for the following reasons:

• Easier upgrades and much longer cycle
• More focus on desktop users with hopefully better (and more meta-style) packages for things like GNOME
• Flash 9 and possibly Flash 10 support through the Linux compatibility layer
• Better performance
• I really don't need it for architectures other than Intel/AMD (although PowerPC and SPARC 64 are available; side note — on the various pages emanating from its platforms page, FreeBSD offers not only official manuals from the makers of the hardware in question but also links to other BSDs that run on the architecture. A very nice touch, I think)
• Community that actually cares about end users who aren't developers

I need to try some live images of recent FreeBSD/PC-BSD releases. (Is PC-BSD a live CD yet? I haven't kept up, but I did utilize the live environment of DesktopBSD back when I was testing it).

I never did the full review I promised of Dru Lavigne's excellent "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, but I find it to be an excellent reference for the FreeBSD and PC-BSD user. Dru is one of the best writers around in the Unix community, and even if you don't run BSD you can learn a lot about using Unix/Linux from this book. I got a whole lot about the shell, file permissions and other Unix sys-admin tasks, from "Basics," just as Michael Lucas' discussion of sudo in "Absolute OpenBSD" makes that now-way-out-of-date book extremely relevant and useful for anybody running any kind of Unix/Linux today who wants to make the most of sudo in their own environment (and especially on the server).

On the same tangentially arrived-at topic, Dru Lavigne's latest book, "Beginning PC-BSD: Frugal Unix for Power Users," is slated to be released three days from now. If past work is any indication, this will be an excellent book for anybody contemplating the use of PC-BSD.

I'd rather Dru write a book on using FreeBSD on the desktop — not necessarily PC-BSD but building out a FreeBSD-based desktop through ports or packages — but I can understand her focusing on PC-BSD given that the iXSystems-led project is a lot closer to what Linux users are used to.

Before I get into this entry, after I wrote it I saw the following in the Sidux release notes:

Kernel 2.6.32 doesn't only improve and stabilise hardware support for newer devices, it also allows enabling KMS (kernel based modesetting) for Intel graphic chipset ...

Note to Linux kernel developers: This doesn't work with the Intel 830m. DOESN'T WORK.

And now back to our regularly scheduled post on how turning off kernel mode setting is the best way to get "today's" Linux distributions to boot into graphical desktops on computers with the Intel 830m graphics chipset:

Remember the last time I figured out how to run both Ubuntu Lucid (via the Alpha 2 image) and Sidux 2009-04 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 and its Intel 830m video chip (aka Intel 82830 CGC)?

I used two methods: using the VESA driver and turning off kernel mode setting.

Both methods worked in Ubuntu Lucid — the project's upcoming 10.04 LTS (long-term support) release.

I tested the live KDE DVD image of Sidux 2009-04 for a number of reasons, one being that I think Sidux is a great project that allows users to run the "unstable" Debian Sid with a minimum of pain, all the while providing a very usable desktop. The other reason is that I know of no other live image (especially a live DVD+R, which my quirky Toshiba likes much better than a CD-R) with which to test the upcoming Debian Squeeze release, now in Testing but eventually slated for Stable designation.

The equally useful Debian Live project allows prospective Debian users to try out Debian on their hardware before committing to a full installation — just like Ubuntu and many other popular distros. As far as I know, you can't install the distro from the Debian Live image, but it is invaluable in terms of seeing how a given computer will respond to Debian.

But Debian Live doesn't appear to have any DVD images (I'm not sure whether or not a CD image can be burned to a DVD+R disc; if anybody out there knows anything, please let me in on it). And I don't see any Squeeze images. They appear to be in Lenny-only mode.

So I turn to Sidux. Despite the "2009-04" tag line, it was released in December 2009. I'm sure Debian Squeeze will move further along by the time it is released as Debian's stable distribution, but it does allow users to try something farther from Lenny and closer to Squeeze without committing to a full installation.

So today I decided to try to boot Sidux not with the VESA driver but by turning off kernel mode setting.

As with Ubuntu Lucid, I started to boot the Sidux 2009-04 DVD, and at the boot screen I added the following to the boot parameters:

I was soon in the surprisingly snappy KDE 4.3.4 environment.

This leads me to believe that turning off kernel mode setting will allow users of Intel 830m video (and most likely other Intel video of similar vintage) to not only run Ubuntu Lucid but very like Debian Squeeze as well. In case it's not implied, for me this is huge. It means I'll have choices as to where to go after Debian Lenny.

While in the Sidux live environment, which I'm enjoying very much by the way, I worked a bit in both the Kwrite and Kate text editors, both of which run great on this machine (1.3. GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM) — much better than the last time I moaned and complained about KDE.

Sidux with KDE on this live DVD — and on this not-so-new hardware — seems no less responsive than Debian Lenny with GNOME. I guess that means I'd be more inclined to use KDE in the future, but I imagine I'll be sticking with GNOME at present (if only because it's working well for me).

In case the message got lost in all of this, the main thing I'm trying to say here is that kernel mode setting is becoming an increasingly big deal in Linux, and for users of Intel video, it not only doesn't help but pretty much renders the given distro unusable.

Turning off kernel mode setting is the key to actually having a working computer and if you can't boot either the live disc or resulting installation and get a working desktop, this is a tweak you should try before messing with xorg.conf or pulling what's left of your hair out.

Attention developers: This "improvement" you call kernel mode setting is pretty much a regression for users of my particular video chip, the Intel 830m, and could be equally useless for other Intel video hardware. Maybe figuring out why kernel mode setting doesn't work in these cases is the thing to do? And how about dropping in some code that automatically turns off kernel mode setting on hardware that doesn't like it until this show-&*^-stopping bug is dealt with?

I don't know who to blame here. I'm no expert, but my gut reaction is that this is a kernel-development problem. My question to you users and developers out there is this: Is kernel mode setting working for you and your Intel video hardware?

Before I end this entry, did I mention how much I like Sidux? I could get used to a distro this good. I'm not the kind of person who needs or wants the latest in everything. To me stability and lack of breakage is key. But just like the first time I tried Sidux (with Xfce), I'm extremely impressed by what its developers have done — and by how quick and usable Debian — be it Sid, Squeeze or Lenny — continues to be.

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.