Some handy tweaks for "legacy" notebooks

[Liam Proven]

I was just playing around with my Maverick install on my Thinkpad X31.
It worked fine but the Unity netbook launcher won't run, probably
because my "ATI Mobility Radeon" isn't /really/ a Radeon, it's a sort
of old 16MB Rage card and it doesn't support full 3D compositing.

Aside from that, it ran OK. Performance wasn't stunning, but acceptable.

The 2 annoying things were that the colour palette for the Plymouth
graphical loading screen was all corrupted, with fringing around the
logo and the activity bullets. If the warning about fscking my disks
appeared, it was almost illegible, as the antialiasing on the letters
turns into fringes of glowing colour.

I seemed to recall reading that the "nomodeset" kernel parameter might
help with this, so I tried it.

Not only did it work perfectly, but also, unlike in 10.04, X.11 works
perfectly afterwards, as well. In 10.04 X started at about half
brightness, making it almost unusable - everything was very dim. When
X starts on 10.x, it fades in gradually, and this never completed
fading up to full brightness on my machine.

Secondly, and a /very/ agreeable bonus, suspend and resume now works
fine. Before, the machine would suspend but not resume.

However, the loading screen was now an ugly red & white text-mode one
in 640*480 on my 1024*768 LCD.

So I tried the old "vga=791" kernel parameter to set the graphics
mode. This worked fine, even in association with "nomodeset", and not
only did it reset my loading screen into graphics mode and get me a
graphical boot sequence again, it also reset my text console to
1024*768, so now I have about 130 columns by 40 lines of crisp sharp
text instead of a grainy, aliases 80*25.

OK, so, there is a long, pregnant pause before the loading screen
appears, and the screen blanks and blinks between the loading screen &
the X.11 login screen appearing, but it /works/.

Then I had to navigate the complexities of GRUB2 to make it permanent.
I found some helpful instructions here:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+question/117977

Emboldened by this, I also set the GRUB menu to 1024*768, which looks
much sharper than the default. It's a shame Ubuntu does not have a
graphical theme for Grub, though. Mint does and it looks much smarter
and more professional.

But then, I thought, my startup sequence is in 1024*768 in 16-bit
colour, but the desktop is in 1024*768 in 24-bit colour, which looks
nice but is slow and means I can't run dual-head with a higher-res
external monitor - not enough VRAM.

So I reapplied my own tweak from when I was experimenting with 10.04
back in June, documented here:
http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/20637.html

... To drop back down to 16 thousand colours in X.

Result, blazing GUI performance once again. Terminal windows scroll
smoothly at full speed & I can drag windows around, quickly, without
lag or shearing.

Hope this might help someone. I'm impressed by the improvement. I
might try disabling DRI in xorg.conf as well - on older versions of
Ubuntu this also gave a serious graphical speed-up.

But mostly, apart from the cosmetics, I am delighted to have suspend &
resume working again. That hasn't worked for me since about Ubuntu
9.04 or 9.10. I just learned to live without it & shutdown & rebooted
a lot.

Hope these tips may be helpful for anyone with graphics or
suspend/resume problems on machines more than 2-3 years old. Mine is a
Pentium-M 1.6GHz from 2004.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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