Public bug reported: After upgrading to 12.04, the display become so garbled as to be unusable. I have to append the boot parameter "nomodeset" which apparently disables nouveau completely, so graphics are unaccelerated. This also happened with a LiveCD, which means Ubuntu does not work "out of box" with this old machine, an Acer Aspire 1705SMi.
After GRUB and without nomodeset, the screen goes blank (dpms mode 3) for about 35 seconds before returning in unreadable-multi-colour-oil- slick form. I'm not sure if the problem is with the xserver driver or the kernel nouveau module, which seems incredibly outdated (I saw a 3 year old build date in a log?!) in the latest Ubuntu. Attaching dmesg and Xorg.0 (without nomodeset). uname etc: Linux galbadia 3.2.0-25-generic #40-Ubuntu SMP Wed May 23 20:33:05 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04 LTS" relevant lspci: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation NV31M [GeForce FX Go5600] [10de:031a] (rev a1) package version: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau: Installed: 1:0.0.16+git20111201+b5534a1-1build2 Candidate: 1:0.0.16+git20111201+b5534a1-1build2 linux-image-3.2.0-25-generic: Installed: 3.2.0-25.40 Candidate: 3.2.0-25.40 ** Affects: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New ** Tags: precise regression-release -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1014775 Title: Completely garbled video in X with nouveau with NV31M (Geforce FX Go5600) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-nouveau/+bug/1014775/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs