Ubuntu 10.04 on HP Compaq nx9005

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) is the slickest new Ubuntu release in a long time. But installing on my crusty old notebook (an HP Compaq nx9005 of 2003 vintage), I had some trouble with the onboard graphics, the R100-based Radeon IGP 320M.

Running glxgears, I'd get about 20 frames of smooth animation, then a 2 second stall, a single frame, another stall, etc. Even after disabling compiz desktop effects, this jerkiness blighted the entire desktop experience, regardless of whether I was running any 3D applications. The machine seemed to run even hotter and noisier than usual, and games like Beneath A Steel Sky and Armagetron Advanced were unusable.

Tom Morton (creator of open source space sim Pioneer) suggested the culprit. Recent Ubuntus have enabled kernel mode-setting (KMS), which you can disable by passing "nomodeset" to the kernel at boot. Here's how to do this permanently:

Edit /etc/default/grub and add nomodeset to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, so it ends up looking something like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

Then run sudo update-grub and restart the machine. Now Lucid Lynx is usable — even snappy.

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