Successfully Installed on Dell Inspiron 1100 (required some tweaking)

For the past few days I had repeatedly failed to successfully get Ubuntu 8.10 installed on an older Dell Inspiron 1100 notebook (yes, its old, yes it sux, but hey - if I can get it working I could use a spare machine around the house!).

Which brought me to ubuntulite - and it works great! However, to get it working I had to use some tricks that folks were using to get the full 8.10 version working. Mainly the following:

0- upgrade the bios to A32 (default on mine was A29). this is available from dell.com, but had to use my windows to install it (this was prior to installing or even trying to install linux).

1- installed ubuntulite using the instructions on the main ubuntulite site.

2- after install, ubuntulite booted to a black screen (no text), so I rebooted and hit ESC at the GRUB screen to do a recovery mode boot up.

2- at the root prompt I edited 2 files: /boot/grub/menu.lst AND /etc/X11/xorg.conf

2a- edit menu.lst (per instructions from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6000430):
vim +89 /boot/grub/menu.lst
Change the line: # defoptions=quiet splash
to read: # defoptions=vga=773 quiet nosplash

2b- edit xorg.conf (per instructions from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6000430):
vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Update it to read like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel 82845G/GL"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Internal monitor"
Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 28-80
VertRefresh 43-60
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "External Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 28-80
VertRefresh 43-60
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Intel 82845G/GL"
Monitor "Internal monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

3- then reboot and enjoy: sudo shutdown -r 0

Frankly, after as many hours trying to get 8.10 working, have a success with unbuntulite feels reeeeeaaaalllll good!!!

Good luck and enjoy;)

Inspiron 1100

The big issue with the Inspiron 1100 is memory management for the onboard video.

The simplest tweak is to stop any use of graphics prior to the log in screen.

Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the default boot line and at the end remove the word splash.

If this fix works for you then you can make it permament by seeking this section
## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the
## alternatives
## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
# defoptions=quiet splash
And removing splash from the end. Thus when the kernel updates splash is not added to the boot parameters.

Even with this fix you can still get an occasional blank screen at login requiring a ctrl-alt-bkspce to reload.

This fix will work for Ubuntus up to 8.10. I have not tried it with 9.04 but the Intel drivers were stuffed in that release so I suspect you will need to add a 2.6.30 kernel and the xorg edgers repository (both in PPA) to get a jaunty install to work properly. Ctrl-alt-bkspce is disabled in Jaunty just to make it a bit harder.

I hope this helps someone.

cheers

No luck with that trick either

Just as the other poster, I tried your method without success on Ubuntu 8.10. What ended up working for me was using the standard xorg.conf (use "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" to get a fresh one made for your system). I then added the following two lines to the "Device" Section:
Driver "intel"
Option "DRI" "0"

That successfully got me into gnome. We'll see how well the system works. Please note that by doing this you effectively disabling direct rendering, so while things should work, they won't perform optimally. From my reading, the bug is in the intel driver, so I guess we'll just have to wait for an update. :(

No luck for me

I've been trying to do the same thing as you: install Ubuntu on my old Inspiron 1100. I followed the instructions to a T, and just cannot seem to fix the problem. Ugh. I'm going to try running Gibbon.