Video for HP Pavilion a1510n with 10.04 worked in 9.10

[Jon Crandell]

Binary package hint: base-installer

Nothing based on Ubuntu 10.04 will display on HP Pavilion a1510n - AMD64 with Nvidia chipset that I have tried. It does work with Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.10.

I am not sure where the problem is, but it maybe some basic change in the kernel. With Kubuntu AMD64 Destop, I can go through the initial install, but I am not able to run Live from the install CD.

One symptom is that I have seen the monitor flash. The Samsung SyncMaster 731B uses 1280x1024 @60hz as the default. I can also load OpenSuSE 11.2 on that system.

[Jon Crandell (jon-crandell)]

This is a regression bug. I am successfully using Ubuntu 9.10 on the HP Pavilion a1510n that cannot display on a monitor with Ubuntu 10.04, Kubuntu 10.04 or Linux Mint 9.

[Jon Crandell (jon-crandell)]

Actually, this is a known issue. It is listed in the release notes under:

Working around bugs in the new kernel video architecture

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS enables the new kernel-mode-setting (KMS) technology by default on most common video chipsets. While this is a major step forward for the graphics architecture in Ubuntu, in some rare cases KMS will prevent your video output from working correctly, or from working at all. If you need to disable KMS, you can do so by booting with the nomodeset option. You can also save this setting so that it's applied at every boot by adding it to your grub config (for GRUB 2: edit /etc/default/grub and add nomodeset to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX, then run sudo update-grub; for GRUB 1: edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add nomodeset to the line beginning with # kopt=, then run sudo update-grub). (533784, 541501)

I was able to use these instructions to get Ubuntu 10.04 up and running.