Ubuntu 9.10 on Dell Inspiron 2600
Apr. 4th, 2010 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
graafenI recently came into ownership, for the princely sum of £0.00, of a Dell Inspiron 2600 laptop. It has a 1GHz Celeron processor, a 20GB IDE hard drive, and 512mb RAM. Given it's age I decided against sticking Windows on it, especially as my experiences with Windows 7 have soured my perception of all other versions of Windows, electing to install Ubuntu 9.10.
I wasn't expecting a flawless installation of Ubuntu on this machine. I already knew that Inspirons of this age have broken BIOS's which lead to many problems, and that Ubuntu's latest Intel drivers have broken support for older Intergrated Graphics chips (i8xx's), but my other alternatives (Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Gentoo) were viable for various reasons.
So I slapped the Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) live CD into it and after selecting to run live the display promptly corrupted. I rebooted and chose to utilise "Safe Graphics Mode", but then it crashed trying to load one of the kernel modules. Finally I had to disable ACPI as well to get it to boot.
The installation process was pretty much flawless from then on, until I restarted. Upon booting it once again had a corrupt display. Disabling ACPI from loading at boot allowed the machine to start properly and I was then able to login.
Now I could have just left everything there, as the laptop worked, but that I couldn't use ACPI bugged me. I tried using APM but got nowhere.
After spending a few hours scouring the internet for possible fixes to this issue, including many bug reports suggesting that ACPI support was borked in the current kernel release, I suddenly had an epiphany...
I asked myself "Why would ACPI cause the display to corrupt?" and that's when it hit me, I hadn't looked at the syslog to see if any errors were being generated at boot. A quick scan showed that ACPI wasn't at fault at all, it was the framebuffer!
I added "nomodeset" to my grub configuration, vesafb and fbcon to the list of modules initramfs should load, and acpi=on to load ACPI, crossed my fingers and booted...
I literally jumped out of my seat in triumph. The laptop booted fine and ACPI now displays the expected information (battery status, power, etc).
The saga is far from over though. I still need to discover what exactly "nomodeset" does that's different to my other grub settings so that I can set up grub without it. Then I need to keep an eye on the above mentioned Intel kernel modules to see when they're fixed (or find a work around). I'll get back onto that once the F1 has finished. :D
Addendum: From what I've found "nomodeset" disables the KMS (Kernel Mode Settings) of the new linux kernels.
From UbuntuWiki: "Kernel mode-setting (KMS) shifts responsibility for selecting and setting up the graphics mode from X.org to the kernel. When X.org is started, it then detects and uses the mode without any further mode changes. This promises to make booting faster, more graphical, and less flickery."
So my plan now is to correct the KMS so that it loads the correct modules/settings.
I wasn't expecting a flawless installation of Ubuntu on this machine. I already knew that Inspirons of this age have broken BIOS's which lead to many problems, and that Ubuntu's latest Intel drivers have broken support for older Intergrated Graphics chips (i8xx's), but my other alternatives (Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Gentoo) were viable for various reasons.
So I slapped the Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) live CD into it and after selecting to run live the display promptly corrupted. I rebooted and chose to utilise "Safe Graphics Mode", but then it crashed trying to load one of the kernel modules. Finally I had to disable ACPI as well to get it to boot.
The installation process was pretty much flawless from then on, until I restarted. Upon booting it once again had a corrupt display. Disabling ACPI from loading at boot allowed the machine to start properly and I was then able to login.
Now I could have just left everything there, as the laptop worked, but that I couldn't use ACPI bugged me. I tried using APM but got nowhere.
After spending a few hours scouring the internet for possible fixes to this issue, including many bug reports suggesting that ACPI support was borked in the current kernel release, I suddenly had an epiphany...
I asked myself "Why would ACPI cause the display to corrupt?" and that's when it hit me, I hadn't looked at the syslog to see if any errors were being generated at boot. A quick scan showed that ACPI wasn't at fault at all, it was the framebuffer!
I added "nomodeset" to my grub configuration, vesafb and fbcon to the list of modules initramfs should load, and acpi=on to load ACPI, crossed my fingers and booted...
I literally jumped out of my seat in triumph. The laptop booted fine and ACPI now displays the expected information (battery status, power, etc).
The saga is far from over though. I still need to discover what exactly "nomodeset" does that's different to my other grub settings so that I can set up grub without it. Then I need to keep an eye on the above mentioned Intel kernel modules to see when they're fixed (or find a work around). I'll get back onto that once the F1 has finished. :D
Addendum: From what I've found "nomodeset" disables the KMS (Kernel Mode Settings) of the new linux kernels.
From UbuntuWiki: "Kernel mode-setting (KMS) shifts responsibility for selecting and setting up the graphics mode from X.org to the kernel. When X.org is started, it then detects and uses the mode without any further mode changes. This promises to make booting faster, more graphical, and less flickery."
So my plan now is to correct the KMS so that it loads the correct modules/settings.
