First of all, I should say that although I haven't used the current version of Ubuntu and this is my first time playing around with Lubuntu, I have fiddled with Ubuntu years back and I run Linux Mint on a daily basis so I'm comfortable with Linux, including the terminal (though don't have a ton of commands memorized). I built the system I'm currently running, but I have more experienced people I go to when I get stumped on a problem--unfortunately one of them's unavailable and the other is swamped and has no time to help me figure out this issue, so I'm hoping someone here might know what to do.
So a friend asked me to put Linux on their old laptop--and I mean old. This is a Dell Inspiron 1100, with 256 mb RAM and a 2.0 GHz processor. You can see the specs on such a beast here: https://www.dell.com/downloads/emea/...pn_1100_uk.pdf
It was running XP, and did so without problems (as long as you don't count slow as molasses in January a problem). But given Microsoft isn't supporting it anymore, she didn't want to connect it to the 'net, so asked me to put Linux on. I decided on Lubuntu pretty fast, realized that the regular install disk might be problematic with the amount of RAM, and went for the alternate installer for 14.04 (obviously 32-bit). Given this, I had no way to test it live, but she had everything backed up, so I went ahead and tried installing.
My first sign of trouble was a line as the installer began about "Unidentified video mode". It gave me about 8 or 10 options, all of which were some version of 640x480 or 800x600. The first time I tried it I picked one of the 640x480s and it installed fine--but the display was reserved to about 3/5 of the entire screen, aligned to the upper left corner. The laptop would properly support 1024x768 from my guess (I didn't even boot into XP so didn't see it), but it was using the 640x480 portion of it--not stretching it to the full screen at all (what was there was at proper size--it was just like someone scrunched everything into the smaller space on the screen but left everything the normal size). The rest of the screen had really weird error-y colors, obviously not intentional.
One of my friends suggested trying the install with "nomodeset", so I did that, and this time it centered a 640x480 display in the middle of the screen (surrounded by black). I'm at an utter loss on what to do--the OS does not recognize any resolution higher than this, and none of the video modes listed (which I can't remember now, it only appeared upon install) supported 1024x768.
Lspci gave this output:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 82)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 02)
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)
02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1510 PC card Cardbus Controller
I ran across a site suggesting looking at vbeinfo in grub, and did so (took a pic with a webcam on a different computer), but not sure if that's relevant or not. Graphics is one area I'm not very good at troubleshooting, I'm afraid!
Anyway, computer seems to work otherwise, connects to the 'net just fine and I've had no trouble with the terminal, browsing folders, etc. Just slow, but that's to be expected (if I get this fixed, might invest in double the ram so it's at least semi-responsive). But a display that tiny isn't going to work for my friend, so I need to figure out how to get it to recognize the entire screen properly. Any suggestions?
EDITED to add solution to first post in case you don't want to read all the way down: I just had to replace "nomodeset" with "i845.modeset=0" in grub, and it fills the full screen now!
Bookmarks