Evening, all.
I've been trying on and off, over the last year, to get an ancient Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop (from 2002) to run one of the 'buntus. I soon realized that with an elderly 'Netburst' Celeron and 1 GB RAM, I was asking too much for Unity to work properly. So I tried Xubuntu & Lubuntu (Kubuntu? Not even GOING there, thank you very much!)
Oh, they would all install. But in every single case, the desktop ended up jammed into the top left-hand corner of the 1024x768 display, at just 640x480; annoying, to say the least. So, since October she's been running Puppy Linux 'Tahrpup' 6.0. Everything worked OOTB, especially the display.
It has an Intel 'Extreme Graphics', 'Brookedale'-cored, 82845 G/GL/GE/PE/PV video adapter; a somewhat awkward device. They threw the rule book out of the window when they designed THAT thing, believe me!
I've tried several of morgaes' workarounds over this time frame, none of which have actually worked.....with the exception of the 'nomodeset' option, which DID at least move the miniature display into the centre of the screen...
Anyway; for no particular reason that I can think of, I decided to have another go at putting Lubuntu 14.04 LTS on her last night, alongside 'Tahrpup' (having tried it before, and liked it). I thought I'd give the most recent point release a try, 14.04.2.....couldn't hurt. I'd done some digging around in the depths of the forum 'back-pages', and found this fix, which promised to sort the problematic card out:-
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...1100%2C+laptop
So I was fully prepared to give the above workaround a try. I installed, and re-booted, not expecting the new install to behave any different to the previous attempts. Well...! WHAT a surprise. There, staring back at me, was a full screen display, with the log-in screen on it. I was GOBSMACKED. Had a job believing my eyes.....
The inclusion of the 3.16 kernel into this point release seems to have tamed the 'awkward' adapter.....it's behaving itself like a charm, for now. Finally, I have a fully-working 'buntu install on the old Dell; many thanks indeed to Julien Lavergne & the Lubuntu team! Wonderful work. I suspect the kernel probably made the biggest difference; even 'Tahrpup' uses the 3.14 kernel.....both of the afore-mentioned being newer than 'Trusty's' original 3.13.
I'm SO pleased, I'm seriously considering making a contribution to the Lubuntu team. They deserve it. Yet the strangest thing is, I've always understood that Intel hardware has worked successfully with the Linux kernel for several years now.....
Odd, indeed. But who CARES...?? The Dell is going from strength to strength..!
Regards,
A VERY pleased Mike.
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