[PLUG] Upgrading Ubuntu from 9.10 to 10.04

[Joe Shisei Niski]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 3:43 PM, Joe Shisei Niski
<joeniski at easystreet.net> wrote:
>
> On 06/24/2010 03:06 PM, Aaron wrote:
>
> What Nvidia card are you using? I have an Nvidia 9800 and it runs great.
>
> On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Joe Shisei Niski <joeniski at easystreet.net>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Both my personal and my employer's laptops have NVidia video cards
>> (different models, about 3 years age difference). i did clean installs
>> of Ubuntu 10.4 from the live CD. The installs were easier that earlier
>> versions. The only difference is that with the older video card, i just
>> get junk pixels for the boot splash screen and in the virtual consoles!
>>
>> By "junk pixels" i mean they're really blocky and for all practical
>> purposes unreadable, though i can make out the word "login". Better yet,
>> all the virtual consoles show up twice on the screen, like two columns.
>
> the problematic one is the GeForce8700M GT, about three years old. It's
> worked beautilfully on prior Ubuntus for three years.
>
> i'll try the "nomodeset" trick this evening.

by playing with Grub i narrowed this one down. Right after installing
Ubuntu 9.10 on this machine i'd installed the StartupManager GNOME app
to do a little customization of the boot process (which is well-nigh
impossible by using grub2 directly without hous of study i don't
really have. i still don't see the value add over the ol grub). My
hope was to get higher-resolution virtual terminals on my 1920x1200
pixel display. No matter which setting i chose in StartupManager, i
had the garbled consoles.

By editing the boot commnd at startup, and removing the "vga=769" or
any other setting put there by StartupManager, all is good - i'm not
getting a high-res virtual terminal (as i did in Ubuntu 9.10), but
they work.

Now on to figure out: how to edit the grub2 settings and rebuild the
configuration... my previous searching for an easy guide to grub2
wasn't too helpful, but that was months ago.
________________________________________
Joe Shisei Niski
Portland, Oregon, USA