I recently purchased an IBM Thinkpad T22 with 256MB ram and a 20GB hard drive, model 2647-4EU. I am new to Windows/Linux, my main machine is a Macintosh.
After installing XP I used gparted to shrink the Windows partition and install UBUNTU Linux (7.04 alternate i386). Everything loaded flawlessly and the Linux system ran fine except about half the time while booting the screen goes black after it says it is starting the GNOME display manager. When it does boot properly I see the screen flicker like it is changing the resolution or something. When it fails to boot properly I don't see the same flicker, the screen just goes black. I let it sit a while just to make sure it isn't just running slow or something but it never comes up. The drive light continues to flicker like it is still accessing the drive so it seems to me to be a video problem.
Last night I installed Debian 40r1 i386 from the DVD ISO. It also installed flawlessly and runs fine except I have the exact same symptoms as with UBUNTU.
Windows always boots up fine so I don't think it is hardware related.

Sounds like it could be a driver problem to me, though they normally crash to a terminal and do not hang with a black screen like that. Can you press ctrl+alt+f1, and get to a terminal that way? Then there may be a way to diagnose the problem from a command line.

This is caused by a known bug with *buntus and the T2x series of IBM ThinkPads. It is a Video driver/chipset problem. I personally spent a considerable amount of time trying to come up with something that was tolerable without much success. I did finally succeed in making the problem go away by pulling the hard drive out of my T20 and sticking it in an A30. Problem solved for me. Runs great on an A30.

Since Ubuntu is based off of Debian, it doesn't surprise me that it does the same thing.

I own, use, and repair ThinkPads. Bottom line, I don't use the T2x's with any distro of Linux anymore. Very similar to the issue that the TP 600e had with sound. Just didn't work, and if you ever managed to succeed, it was hardly worth the trouble and didn't stay that way long. I'm not even going to bother going into the heat related issues with these waffle irons...

OTOH, maybe you should continue working on it. I promise that you will learn alot about Linux before it is over. :-)

James

If you can get into a Virtual Console, open up your xorg.conf & change the driver to say "vesa". That should at least stop the resolution shuffling.

ctrl+alt+f1 does nothing. Neither does ctrl+alt+del or ctrl+alt+backspace.

Are there any Linux distros that would work better? Is there some sort of generic driver I could load for the video that wouldn't have problems? It's kind of weird that sometimes it boots up fine and sometimes I get the black screen and nothing else.
I probably won't get another laptop at this time, maybe sometime in the future.

That seems to work! I was actually able to get it to fully boot after 4 tries and I found the file and edited it. It has booted correctly 4 times in a row!
Where can I find the best information on the different Linux distros and why I would want one over the other? A friend told me he uses Debian and that is the reason I downloaded it.

Excellent! Be aware though that vesa is just a basic driver, so you won't be able to get high resolutions or 3D acceleration with it.

For distro comparisons, polishlinux has a comparison chart: http://polishlinux.org/choose/ You can fill out a distro selector and compare different distros. Don't take it too seriously though, ultimately the choice is your own preference. I chose Ubuntu because I wanted an up-to-date distro that wasn't constantly moving packages, such as in Debian Testing or Unstable. I still like Debian, but having a nice, frozen platform seems to fit my needs.

Seems to me I had the best luck with Suse and Slackware for typical installs. If I recall correctly, FreeBSD gave me the least headaches. BEOS ran very nicely on it, although I never was able to get any of my NICS to work in it. For what it is worth, I even installed Plan 9 on it and it worked well, although I couldn't find a good reason to leave it on there.

My son-in-law ran Redhat Fedora on his T20 for a couple of years. He also played with several of the mini-distros, IE: Puppy, DSL, Vector, etc.

Use your Ubuntu install with the vesa driver for a while. Right now it's more important to learn and become familiar with Linux than it is to choose with distro you use for the rest of your life. :-) Ubuntu provides a smooth start. There is plenty of time to distro hop later when you know what your doing.

James

Thanks for all the help! It now boots properly every time! I may try loading UBUNTU again and trying the vesa driver.