Munckfish.net

After an evening of tinkering I’ve managed to get the Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy Badger” LiveCD running on an Acer Aspire 9500.

The first problem was that the screen went blank just after the boot prompt. It seemed to get as far as loading the kernel and then it would just stop. This was resolved by typing live vga=771 noapic nolapic at the boot prompt instead of just pressing <enter> for the default behaviour.

The second problem I faced was that even though all the installation screens seemed to pass without issue I was finally left with a blank screen instead of the shiny Gnome desktop.

The solution was found in this post on the Suse forums. The advice given was to add these 2 extra “Options” to the “Device” section of xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
     ... # automatically generated stuff here
    Option "CRT2Position" "clone"
    Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS,CRT"
EndSection

In order to add these settings I followed these steps:

1. Swap to an alternative console by typing Ctl+Alt+F1
2. Become root. This can be done in Ubuntu by executing: sudo -s.
3. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the options shown above.
4. Restart GDM by swapping to run level 3 then back to runlevel 5.

   root@ubuntu$ telinit 3
   # ... wait for bit while runlevel changes then
   # press enter to get back to the prompt
   root@ubuntu$ telinit 5
   

5. At this point if successful you should be taken to the Gnome desktop.

Not sure why this happened and and I’m not sure what these 2 options are. However I’m hoping the ATI knowledge base will shed some light on that.

The next task is to try to install the full Ubuntu distro to the hard disk.