the edge of logic and intuition

I wrote in a previous post about installation of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx on an old PC for display to a TV which (other than a couple of known issues) worked OK. Given that I have a working 9.10 setup on my main home laptop (this laptop is used for all open university work, emails, etc so is my primary computer really) I didn’t change this immediately but I had the urge for shiny new stuff so now I’ve got a couple of nasty assignments out of the way and a day off work I decided to install lucid to my main laptop. (Unusually, taking a backup first – nothing is normally lost in the install process if you mount the home partition correctly and don’t format it, but just in case.) Unfortunately the “blank screen” / “won’t boot” bug got me.

a few places have already detailed this issue – I didn’t have any issue with this on the PC install, I presume due to the different hardware setup (graphics card etc). My laptop is a (couple of years old now) Samsung R60 Plus with a dual core Intel processor and ATI Radeon graphics card and the issue seems to be due to a graphics card incompatibility (?) and the suggested fix on sources such as the above is the ‘nomodeset’ option which worked on the Live CD install for me but not once it was actually installed.

In case anyone is coming to this site via a search and has an ATI Radeon graphics card specifically, the steps I eventually went through were these:

• On the Live CD (ie running as “live” rather than “install”) go to the boot menu by pressing a key at the initial startup then select F6 (to choose additional options) and select the “nomodeset” option, then boot “Try Ubuntu without installing”

This worked for me and having loaded the live environment I then did the normal ‘Install’ shortcut from the desktop to install from the live system.

Once installed I got the blank screen again, this was once the initial Ubuntu logo had displayed but then it took me to either a blank screen or a “command line” login which I should have the normal graphical login environment. X would not start from this scenario.

• Following the instructions on-screen, selecting the GRUB menu option for the appropriate boot (I have a few as I also have a Windows installation and some other bits on the laptop but you may only have one if Ubuntu is the only os) choose ‘e’ to edit the boot option and add in after “quiet splash”: radeon.modeset=0  (I tried the ‘nomodeset’ option here but it did not solve it on the installed version for my graphics card)
• If this works then edit the grub menu option so that this is done permanently (rather than ‘e’ every boot)

This seems to have been a known issue for a while (from the alpha and beta versions and persisting into the final release) and whilst I was able to use the information online to find a fix as a reasonably experienced Linux user I think this sort of thing would put off the ‘newbie’ user, the type of users that we are trying to get to switch from Windows to Linux (whether ubuntu or another) – I have probably more patience than many people for bugs and workarounds as I know how it is, developing software myself, but it seems to me this is a major bug likely to put off the newbie user who would expect things to “just work” or certainly probably wouldn’t know what to search for or how to use the information online to apply to their system (especially if they weren’t really sure what parts they have in their pc etc). 10.04 whilst it has a lot of improvements on 9.10 also seems to have a few other buggy bits, most of which could probably be accepted or worked around, but issues like this are one of the obstacles IMO to widespread adoption of linux on the desktop. As I think if I were a newbie user and encountered something like this it would put me off trying Linux again!

In the meantime my suggestion to a new/potential Linux user is still to stick with 9.10 which I have found to be quite stable and bug-free, unless a more experienced person is around to deal with any bugs and quirks. (Next task: to revisit Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet installation on this laptop!)