Monday, April 25, 2011

Video problems on Dell Inspiron 1501 and Linux

I tried installing Ubuntu 10.10 on my girlfriend's Dell Inspiron 1501 using the normal and alternate install CD. Both methods would appear to install fine, but on the first reboot after BIOS POST, it would hard  freeze on a black screen.

I tried installing Linux Mint 10 instead. It also installed fine and the first reboot got to the login menu normally, but subsequent reboots generally got vertical multi color bars right after BIOS POST. I left it on while doing something else, the screen went to sleep, and when I woke it back up, the login menu came up normally. It took me several hours of research and trial and error, but I figured out how to get the login menu to come up normally right after power on.

The short version is use the nomodeset boot stanza.

The long version is if you can't get your computer to boot, turn it off and back on, then immediately hold down the shift key until you see the Grub2 boot menu. I didn't try this myself, but you should be able to set the grub boot options. Choose (or add to the boot line if it brings it up to edit) "nomodeset".

After you get your computer to boot fully, to set this option for future boots without having to do it manually, open up a terminal and type

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

find the line that says
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

You may have different options in quotes; most will probably have "quiet splash". Quiet says most boot messages will be hidden, splash says you'll get a pretty loading screen, nomodeset supresses kernel video mode setting. Apparently it doesn't work well with some older laptop video cards. If you have anything else in your boot options, be sure not to delete it, just add nomodeset to the end. Mine looked like the following -

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

Press ctrl+x to close the text editor and "y" to save changes

then do

sudo update-grub

Now you should boot correctly in the future. Now I just have to figure out why the battery on this tool of a laptop refuses to charge. I've tried several different adapters, and the battery self test button reports the battery as having 100% life and no errors. So either the battery really is bad, or the charging socket has a bad connection to the motherboard. I can't decide if it is worth risking $25 on a new eBay battery.