Comment 2 for bug 714634

Hi kjloh, I'm sorry you're having troubles with Ubuntu on this laptop. Unfortunately we are not providing X development support in the distro for 8xx, as we've found it to be too labor intensive to provide development support for these older chipsets directly in the distro. Instead, I would recommend you work directly with upstream by filing a bug report at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/, as they're in a better position to validate fixes and work with you to test their future changes.

It sounds like you have a good lead on this being a regression between .37 and .38, which is a very strong clue. You may be able to do a git bisect to the kernel to locate the offending patch. If you do, then share this info with upstream, which will help them identify the flaw and get the fix into a future upstream release that we can pull in for Ubuntu. (We probably won't backport i855 fixes, since we've tended to find it can lead to unexpected regressions, but we will take i855 fixes via new upstream releases.)