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IBM T21 Live CD Booting Problem

Hi,

This problem *may* be specific to my laptop, but I don't think so. I've tried booting from Ubuntu 7.10, gOs 1.01, and neither of them work. They all appear to boot, but the monitor remains black as night at the point you would normally expect to see the desktop.

The initial option screen comes up fine on both and I've tried the default option and the Safe Graphics option for Ubuntu. In the Safe Graphics option, I actually saw the top menu bar appear, but it was in a band across the middle of the screen and the font was very tall and skinny - like hard-to-read skinny.

I then tried a Knoppix live CD (I think it's Knoppix 4.0, with kernel 2.6.12) and it came straight up and works just fine. The laptop also has a working copy of Windows 2K on it and I was fixing to prepare a dual-boot into Ubuntu.

Can anyone advise on how I might resolve this graphics display problem? I've googled and searched this forum but no one seems to have had this exact problem, furthermore several reports show that the T21 works just fine on 7.10.

Regards

Peatmoss/Alleria

It sounds like Ubuntu isn't detecting the X settings properly, very common problem. Here is my working xorg.conf file from my T21:

Code:

Section "Module"

    SubSection  "extmod"

    EndSubSection

    Load        "freetype"

EndSection

Section "Files"

    FontPath  "/usr/share/fonts/misc"

    FontPath  "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"

    FontPath  "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"

EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

    Identifier        "Keyboard1"

    Driver        "kbd"

    Option "AutoRepeat" "500 30"

    Option "XkbRules"        "xorg"

    Option "XkbModel"        "pc104"

    Option "XkbLayout"        "us"

EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

    Identifier        "Mouse1"

    Driver        "mouse"

    Option "Device"      "/dev/input/mice"

    Option "ZAxisMapping"  "4 5 6 7"

    Option "Emulate3Buttons"

    Option "EmulateWheel"          "on"

    Option "EmulateWheelButton"    "2"

EndSection

Section "Monitor"

    Identifier  "My Monitor"

    HorizSync  31.5 - 48.5

    VertRefresh 50-100

EndSection

Section "Device"

    Identifier  "** S3 Savage (generic)                [savage]"

    Driver      "savage"

EndSection

Section "Screen"

    Identifier  "Screen 1"

    Device      "** S3 Savage (generic)                [savage]"

    Monitor    "My Monitor"

    DefaultDepth 24

    Subsection "Display"

        Depth      8

        Modes      "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

        ViewPort    0 0

    EndSubsection

    Subsection "Display"

        Depth      16

        Modes      "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

        ViewPort    0 0

    EndSubsection

    Subsection "Display"

        Depth      24

        Modes      "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

        ViewPort    0 0

    EndSubsection

EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"

    Identifier  "Simple Layout"

    Screen "Screen 1"

    InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"

    InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"

EndSection

Thanks for that information, but it seems like a chicken-and-egg problem in this case. The live CD is "discovering" the hardware as it boots and by the time I can do anything about it the screen is already not working. Since the machine is booting from CD, I don't see how I could fix the problem by writing my own file to disk and then starting the live CD up.

Regards

Peatmoss/Alleria

Is there an alternate install method of Ubuntu, without the GUI? Since you plan to install it anyway, may as well just do it and fix the X problem with it installed.