Ubuntu Lucid Lynx with LG E300

LG E300 is my personal laptop used since tha last two years. All this time i’ve been trying to keep it wih two different operating systems, to use, and practice. I’m not a complete Linux addicted as i was a couple years ago, but it’s a good practice to see and investigate Linux world changes. I’ve elected two years ago the Ubuntu distro, as the Fedora distro was unable to work correctly on the laptop. I’ve always preferred Redhat Linux and continued to use Fedora after the conversion of the “free” branch of the Redhat distro.

Well, recently at my laptop i’ve updated my system to Lucid Lynx because the system was in the Karmic Koala version. The system worked flawless with Karmic Koala, as the opposite with 8.0.4.

But since the upgrade to Lucid….. a blank screen was all i see. No mather if i use the Live CD or, as in my case, tryed to boot the system after and upgrade using apt-get.

Today, and after been stayed quite disappointed with Fedora 13 on my Desktop where it has been unable to install the network interface, and as for that being complete unusable (remember the times where Internet connection was not permanent?) and being installed with Lucid Lynx instead, i’ve retried to revive Lucid on the Laptop.

After bumping in some forums in Ubuntu Forums i had realized that the problem in in fact with the GPU drivers/modules- a Ati Radeon Xpress 1250 i think.

Well for this to work, i’ve tested the launch with Live CD. Managed to work passing some parameters in boot.

OK, now the quicksteps:

– At the boot screen where a computer appear just hit space or enter to access Lucid’s menus.

– Choose your language and keymap, and after that press F6.

– Following your press at F6 press escape. Select the correct entry, and before the “quiet nosplash” just put ” radeon.modeset=0 “.

This will boot the system ok.

Since in my case my system was been recently upgraded and never managed to et it started, i’ve also added the parameter ” xforcevesa ” wich in combination with the “radeon.modeset=0 “. At the grub list just press e to edit the corresponding grub entry, add the ” radeon.modeset=0 xforcevesa ” before the “quiet nosplash”, or even replacing it (if you would like to see lots of text as in older systems at your screen). This leaded me to a console login. In here i’ve just upgraded my system.

OK, at this point all worked, just only had to make changes permanently. One option is to edit grub.conf and put the “radeon.modeset=0 ” in it, but when a kernel update was applied it stops to work again. So i’ve followed this simply example :

echo options radeon modeset=0 > /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf

or just create a “/etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf” with “echo options radeon modeset=0” on it using your favorite text editor.

This will disable KMS. KMS (Kernel mode-setting) 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.

Reboot and confirm that works.