I've been seeing very similar behaviour as John at Canterbury in all desktop Ubuntu releases since 7.04, except the "black display" problem occurs randomly about 50% of the time on my system. The same "switch TTYs" workaround works for me too.
Since upgrading to 8.10 I've been presented with a dark red/brown screen (very) occasionally, but the vast majority of the time its black. Disabling usplash seems to have no effect.
My system is an Aopen Minipc MP965 with a similar spec to John's: an Intel GM965 chipset and X3100 integrated graphics, but I only have a single VGA monitor attached (an Acer P223W LCD running at 1680 x 1050)
I'll grab the Xorg logs next time I see this happen.
I've been seeing very similar behaviour as John at Canterbury in all desktop Ubuntu releases since 7.04, except the "black display" problem occurs randomly about 50% of the time on my system. The same "switch TTYs" workaround works for me too.
Since upgrading to 8.10 I've been presented with a dark red/brown screen (very) occasionally, but the vast majority of the time its black. Disabling usplash seems to have no effect.
My system is an Aopen Minipc MP965 with a similar spec to John's: an Intel GM965 chipset and X3100 integrated graphics, but I only have a single VGA monitor attached (an Acer P223W LCD running at 1680 x 1050)
I'll grab the Xorg logs next time I see this happen.