Trying to revive an old machine here, installed Lubuntu 12.04 on an CF card and plugged it into my old ThinkPad 240Z using VMWare, since the machine doesn't have a CD-ROM (well, a bootable one at least, just an old honkin' PCMCIA one.)

All is well and things run pretty smooth, except for one thing: screen draw issues, see this:

http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/4166/cimg0098u.jpg

Strangely, it goes away if I have Chromium or LXTerminal opened on maximize, and happens only on other applications that uses window manager cons of some sort (e.g. Pidgin, control panels, etc).

I checked the siliconmotion driver is already installed in Synaptic.

Did you md5sum Lubuntu 12.04 after you downloaded the iso and put it on the cf card. Might be a corrupted iso download and install. This will cause strange behavior when running applications. Some will work, some won't. CF cards are slow at best. I used a ide to cf adapter and use a Hitachi 8 gig Microdrive in the hardrive bay instead which is faster and more durable than cf. It won't work though without the ide to cf adapter. Because I tried with a pcmcia to cf adapter and bios wouldn't recognize it as a ide device. Looks like This which goes in the hard drive caddy.

240Z CEL 500
P3 600 64(192) SDRAM 10.4" TFT 800x600
1024x768 NeoMagic MagicGraph 128XD (NM2160) 2M
Silicon Motion LynxEM+ (SM712) 2M ESS Solo 1 (ES1946)
Cirrus Logic CS4281 Lucent 56k V.90 Win
Ethernet Opt
Maximum Memory: 192MB
Slots: 1

I run Antix on my old IBM a22m 1000hz cpu 512MB ram and also IBM T23 1.2 ghz cpu with 1gig of ram. Not that I am recommending another distro. Just saying what I run OK on older machines. So I am not Lubuntu proficient.

I'm sure the ISO is OK because I used the same one to install two other machines.

It's not the speed I'm having an issue with, it seems to run just fine, and I actually have that similar adapter running but in place of it is a high speed Transcend CF. Graphics seem to go corrupt when there are stuff drawn by the window manager.

I'm thinking it could be some hardware detection issues, so thinking might have to do an actual reinstall on the actual machine, just have to find a way for it to boot properly given it doesn't support USB boot or PCMCIA boot. Had some luck with plop boot but USB 1.1 is painfully slow.

If it's an older machine it might be better to use Debian Squeeze or a derivative instead of Lubuntu.

Go here while in browser

http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/

It will spit out a report you can read for hardware detection and drivers and yes and no answers if device is working.

Yeah, tried that and no driver issues were found. Seems like it might be a compatibility issue with the LynxEM+ driver with LXDE, the exact same artifacting happened on the Live CD boot. I'll give Xubuntu a try.

Thanks for the help so far.

Tried a few more stuff, booting into 11.10 and Linux Mint 12 LXDE. Seemingly at this point I can conclude the LynxEM+ is incompatble with LXDE somehow, as I get the exact same issue in all of them.

Found a bug in launchpad as well: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...on/+bug/441284

Xubuntu works fine but it's SLOW AS MOLASSES...

Guess I need to hunt for another distro...

Found out what it was. Turns out it's not LXDE but the siliconmotion driver in Xorg, since the same thing happened with Debian Squeeze with XFCE. Turned off Graphics Acceleration and problem went away. Though I hope the Xorg guys will fix this some time because without harware acceleration it's kinda slow.

Added the option "NoAccel" in my xorg.conf and it was all good.