Comment 7 for bug 500999

It is not an xorg bug, but from the pictures it looks like it could be a problem with the i915 kernel module and those bugs are handled upstream by the same people who handle bug for xserver-xorg-video-intel, so I leave that task open for now.

Thanks for tracing it down to 2.6.31-rc7. Perhaps you can bisect if further down? It is somewhat time consuming, but usually finding the bad commit is more than halfway to resolve a bug. There is a relatively straightforward guide for how to build ubuntu packages from git at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/GitKernelBuild . You can check out 2.6.31-rc7 and with `git checkout v2.6.31-rc7` before running `make oldconfig`. Then the git-bisect manpage should explain how to proceed pretty much by example. You would need to build roughly 7 kernels in order to identify a bad commit between rc6 and rc7. It may be a good idea to build and test rc6 and rc7 in order to verify your findings with a self-built kernel.

Could you try to add the kernel parameter 'nomodeset' and see if it changes anything? You can add this by pressing 'e' on the grub boot menu and adding it after 'quiet splash'.Alternatively, you may add it in /etc/default/grub and run update-grub.