Comment 54 for bug 554023

Odd - your dmesg+with_drm.debugAndKVM file doesn't actually have any output from the intel driver *at all*. It doesn't even appear to try to load. I'm not sure what to make of that.

The problem that you're seeing here is in the kernel - by default, the i915 kernel module is responsible for monitor detection and modesetting, which is what's going wrong here. We can go two ways: try out the modesetting code in the xserver-xorg-video-intel DDX by passing “nomodeset” to the kernel command line, or try to pin down which kernel broke modesetting for you.

You can get previous kernels from https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/linux

It might be worth trying both options :)