Recently in Kernel mode setting in Ubuntu Category

Update: I checked in my dmesg, and somewhere in the boot process Ubuntu Lucid is automatically turning off kernel mode setting for my Intel 830m-running (82830 CGC) laptop (emphasis mine):

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ dmesg | grep drm
[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32-22-generic (buildd@rothera) (gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) ) #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 28 13:27:30 UTC 2010 (Ubuntu 2.6.32-22.33-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2)
[ 2.112751] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[ 2.182073] [drm] i915 disabling kernel modesetting for known bad device.
[ 2.192838] [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20080730 for 0000:00:02.0 on minor 0
steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$

I've been turning off KMS in all Linux distributions for quite some time (OK, maybe the past three months). But recently I've experimented with removing i915.modeset=0 manually from Grub in Ubuntu Lucid, and everything is working as well as before.

Today I edited my Grub configuration (still using the Ubuntu Grub2 community page as a reference) and removed the line turning off KMS entirely.

Looking at the dmesg above, kernel mode setting hasn't been "fixed" for older Intel video, but at least the kernel knows not to turn it on when you're running an i915-type chipset (of which i810 is seemingly a subset).

This is how things should have been handled from the beginning. Better late than never — this remains huge for Linux — and for Ubuntu. Why? Because the potential new user with affected Intel chipsets can now grab a live CD, start up Ubuntu and actually have it work. They won't be stopped and immediately turned off by a totally black screen.

As a user with a little experience, I know about turning off KMS, but if I was coming to Linux with no experience whatsoever, I'd think Ubuntu and/or Linux was a big load of crap (what, the SCREEN doesn't WORK? ... you've got to be KIDDING ME).

This change isn't a technological breakthrough, but it's a huge step forward for Linux (and Ubuntu) uptake among potential users, and I thank whoever is responsible for bringing sanity back to Linux and Xorg.

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.

After figuring out how to get the screen to work on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 and Gateway Solo 1450 laptops — both with Intel 830m video chips (aka 82830 CGC, also called i830m by many) in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, do you want to know how things "improved" in Alpha 3?

There's no improvement. Instead it's a massive fail.

Yep, another volley of "improvements" that undoubtedly helped someone had foisted on me the mother of all regressions.

The closest I was able to get was a working display with an invisible mouse pointer. Unfortunately I had forgotten which combination of parameters I typed into the boot line (a combination of turning off kernel mode settting one of two ways and setting a vga=xxx resolution), and after trying just about every VGA number I could find here, I've got nothing; no video at all on this Intel 830m system in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3.

In some way bowing to my issues — in my own mind at least — after booting the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3 live disc (CD or DVD), unlike the Alpha 2 you can now choose the nomodeset parameter from the F6 Other Options menu on the boot screen.

That's great, except that it no longer works for me.

How many potential new users of Linux have Intel video chips that are like mine? Do others besides the 830m have this problem?

All I know is booting a live CD and having absolutely no video is no way to get new users ...

In a related matter, I burned a DVD of PC-BSD 8. While the live environment is not exactly scintillating — it's KDE with barely any apps, it does boot into a graphical desktop that looks absolutely perfect with no intervention on my part. Yep, the FreeBSD and PC-BSD developers seem to understand that the video should just work, even for those of us unfortunate enough to be running 2002-era laptops with Intel video chips.

Should this not be the fault of Ubuntu but something that plagues all versions of Linux including Debian, at least I'll have PC-BSD 8.0 to turn to.

Or I could use the xorg.conf that makes Debian Lenny work for me and run Slackware 12 or 13.

As has been written in the comments recently, I should file a bug on this. If only I understood how to extract the seemingly dozens of log files needed to substantiate such a bug report (and to do so with a non-working screen), I'd probably go that route.

Regressions like this verge on the catastrophic. You can't just go cutting off entire swaths of hardware. I do seem like the only person complaining about this, so maybe there are fewer people using laptops with Intel 830m chipsets than you might think.

At this rate, my recent practice of burning these alpha discs is pretty much over. The Ubuntu Lucid release day is less than two months away, and I'm going to wait until that time to try this LTS (long-term-support) release again.

That also means I'll be sticking with Debian Lenny until there's some kind of live environment that I can test before any upgrade to Squeeze.

Before I wrap this up, yes I realize that this isn't even beta software but alpha, and there's a good chance my video issue will be resolved, but seeing things go from "pretty good" to "no can do" instead of the other way around is more than a little disconcerting.

My laptops using Intel 830m (aka i830m ... aka 82830 CGC) video don't like kernel mode setting. They don't work with it.

But turning it off, they work wonderfully with no xorg.conf in anything with a 2.6.32 Linux kernel — and that means Ubuntu Lucid (currently in Alpha 3 stage, though I'm using the Alpha 2 image at the moment) and Sidux 2009-04 (and presumably Debian Squeeze, the current Testing release for the distribution).

Until now I've been turning off kernel mode setting in the boot line with:

i915.modeset=0

I just discovered, tested and confirmed that this boot parameter does the job just as well:

nomodeset

The latter's a bit "cleaner," don't you think. I promised in a comment that I would look into bugs related to this problem, but things look in a whole lot of disarray. Some people submit so many log files, outputs and other things that I wouldn't have the expertise to assemble in a dozen years. Others haven't yet landed on the solution I've written about in a couple dozen of these entries.

So unless someone out there can direct me to the "best" bug in either Debian, Ubuntu, Xorg or the Linux kernel itself, I'm gonna stay out of it and just continue writing about it here.

Am I the only person out there with not just one but THREE laptops using the Intel 830m chipset?

If not, either of the two boot parameters mentioned above make the X problem go away. I'm sure kernel mode setting is a wonderful thing, just not for this particular graphics chipset.

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.