[Bug 2012181] Re: lunar (alpha) grub "no usable video mode found"

[David Coe]

To correct some chaos introduced by my repeated upgrading and back-
grading Grub, I did a clean install of the latest Kubuntu Lunar (beta)
on the vintage Vostro 400. It is a PC/BIOS machine but (as I think is
standard these days) insists/prefers to have an EFI partition to boot
from.

As before, the vanilla grub2 2.06-2ubuntu16 produces all the boot
errors/artifacts/diagnostics outlined above. This time, I back-graded
just the grub2-common grub-common grub-pc grub-pc-bin 2ubuntu12.1 debs
from the Kinetic archive thus avoiding any dependency issues seen with
the 2ubuntu14.1 or 2ubuntu17 packages. Things then behave as expected!

I think it might (?) be a mistake to release Lunar with the bits of Grub
aimed at PC/BIOS machines left as at present. If the regression is
general (and not just Vostro and me), there is bound to be a flood of
feedback :-(.

Best regards and, as always, my thanks.

David

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2012181

Title:
  lunar (alpha) grub "no usable video mode found"

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  I'm bare-metal testing Kubuntu Lunar 23.04 on a collection of amd64
  machines connected in an MPI cluster. Things have gone very smoothly
  indeed, despite it being still an alpha-release!

  However, one machine (an elderly Dell Vostro 400) is showing a
  regression for Grub 2.06-2ubuntu16 compared with Kinetic 22.10. The
  following occurs during boot-up:

    error: no server specified
           no suitable video mode found
           no video mode activated

  The grub menu stubbornly displays at 640x480 (AMD Turks driving a LG
  24EA52 1920x1080 monitor usually picks up just fine). Auto-detection
  no longer functions and manual changes to GRUB_GFXMODE are ignored.

  X11 starts and KDE initializes as usual (and at the correct
  resolution), so the error message is somewhat cosmetic and doesn't
  seem to affect more modern machines. Nonetheless, it does seem a bug
  that could/should be corrected.

  Best regards and thank you.

  David Coe

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