ubuntu 9.10 screen flickering problem on Thinkpad R31 with Intel 83830 Graphics

Question

I am trying to revitalize an old Thinkpad R31 that has the Intel 82830 graphics and only 256 MB of RAM.

I have tried a Xubuntu 9.10 Live CD. After booting the screen blinks so much that it is practically unreadable.

I have searched for updated IBM Thinkpad drivers but I only found drivers for Windows on the Thinkpad support web site.

EDIT: I have changed the title and the description. It is not a problem of the drivers. It seems to be a problem with the kernel. See my own answer below.

Answer 1

I have collected more information, and I solved my problem.

Here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1318523 is an exact description of the very same problem

And here http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1307879.html is an explanation of a possible answer

essentially the problem is a conflict of the intel 830 driver and Kernel probing, which is enabled by default since Kernel 2.6.30-10.12 ( see this link https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/KernelModeSetting )

So, the solution to the screen problem is disabling Kernel probing by setting the option i915.modeset=0 in the kernel boot command line.

But, this leads to another different problem.

As documented in some web sites, this fix is accomplished by adding the option in /boot/grub/menu.lst

But, there is no /boot/grub/menu.lst in my xubuntu 9.10 .

Looking further, I found /boot/grub/grub.cfg instead.

grub.cfg has a big warning in its header DO NOT EDIT THIS.

The grub.cfg header documents that the grub.cfg file is generated from /etc/default/grub.

So following this path, I came up with the solution

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1. I modified /etc/default/grub adding i915.modeset=0 to the default linux boot GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT

2. Then I regenerated grub.cfg with update-grub

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And .. it works.

Answer 2

You need to run mousepad as root, using something like "sudo mousepad" in a command prompt.