My Thinkpad X31 laptop with a Radeon M6 graphics chip had a problem with ACPI Suspend/Resume. About every five resumes, the graphics card would get messed up, making the screen unusable.
The computer would suspend/resume fine otherwise, but I’d be forced to reboot just to get X working again. (Just shutting down X and re-starting it wasn’t enough.)
The easy solution is to pass a “nomodeset” option to the kernal upon boot, but to do this on different versions of Ubuntu you need to do modify files in different places.
9.04: Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, and look for the defoptions= line. Add nomodeset to the end. Run sudo update-grub afterwards to save your changes.
9.10: Edit the /etc/grub.d/10_linux file to add a line such as:
GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA = "$GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA nomodeset"
or just add “nomodeset” to the end of a previous GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA entry. After this, run sudo update-grub.
10.04: Edit the /etc/defaults/grub file and change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset"
(You may have to run sudo update-grub again, or it may be taken care of for you)
Commentary: I find it funny that in each of the last three version’s of UBUNTU the name and location of the grub configuration file has changed…
Let’s add to the confusion and say that in ubuntu 10.04 file/etc/defaults/grub nor /etc/default/grub exists. But I need to set exactly an env variable that would be in that file to be able to set up a headless ubuntu 10.04 server…
On my 10.04 system the /etc/defaults/grub files exist, so I don’t have a suggestion for you.