willoblog

Ubuntu Karmic is to be released on thursday, and the release candidate is available since a few days. So I tried to install it on a laptop that I don’t really use daily. I installed from scratch, with the live CD, desktop version.

This is a laptop I bought in May 2004, an Asus M2400n. It almost worked…
First, you have to specify on the live CD boot : acpi=off and nolapic by hiting F6. Then, you have no sound but it will work at the end. Installation works fine, as usual. To first boot after installation, you have to hit shift and escape when Loading GRUB is displayed (it’s very quick), then «e» to edit the first menu item and add the same boot options on the kernel line.

There are three things to do to make the release candidate work (hope this will be fix this week). One on Grub to boot properly, and two big issues with the display.

Modify Grub boot options

New in Karmic : Grub2 is finally used, and the famous /etc/boot/grub/menu.lst doesn’t exist anymore. Some explanations are available within the Internet. All you need to know is that you have to modify /etc/default/grub, and particularly the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable to add nolapic. Do not add acpi=off, or you will never ear any sound.
After any modification of /etc/default/grub, you have to do sudo update-grub in order to modifiy the Grub intern files.

Kernel issue

The new kernel display handling (Kernel mode-setting, KMS) may be a little buggy… Anyway, with this method and with Intel graphic chipset like the i855GM in this laptop, it makes Xvideo not available (which results in a very buggy display, CPU high load, and unespected reboot with some softwares or websites). To deactivate KMS, you have to add nomodeset] to the boot options in /etc/default/grub.

This two issues can be simply solved by

sudo sed -i '/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT/s/^\(.*\)"$/\1 nolapic nomodeset"/' /etc/default/grub
sudo update-grub

Intel driver issue

The current Intel driver has also some bugs. With this driver, the display freezes sometimes, very quickly after login, even before. It’s only a display freeze, not a system crash at all (computer is still pingable and ssh-ing still works).
I hope most of these bugs will be quickly solved, but till then we can use the vesa generic driver. It’s not as simple as before, because Xorg has also changed, and the famous /etc/X11/xorg.conf no longer exists… But you can write a new minimalist one, only containing what you want to modify. You can this way write in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
  Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
  Driver 	  "vesa"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier      "Default Screen"
  Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
  Device          "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Nothing else to do, the configuration file is automatically read as soon as the system reboots or Xorg restarts.

This way, presently my Asus M2400n works fine. Hope this helps.