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I’m changing jobs. Yes, I will be moving from being the eTECH Systems Administrator here at Arkansas Tech University, and I will be tackling the challenge of a Technology Coordinator in the public school system. I am really, really excited about this move. One of the great things is they are providing me with a new laptop. A really pretty piece of art known as the Dell Latitude D830. 2 Gigs of ram in this baby and a brand new Intel Centrino Duo. Very sweet since I run alot of desktop applications for my development projects. Tried to install Ubuntu on it, and had a very unusual problem. Ubuntu wouldn’t install from the Live CD. It would load the CD and get all the way to the actually gui part of the hotdisk, and I would get dumped into something called ‘BusyBox’. I have no idea what that is, incidentally not many people at the Ubuntu Forums and their developers site know what it is or what causes it. What we do know is that it has something to do with the new graphics card Dell is pumping out. It is called the ‘Intel^® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100′ I have a suspicion it is the 3D graphics accelerator portion of the card. Especially since Nvidea and ATI cards with 3D graphics acceleration has this problem as well. There are some work arounds but this is crap, you shouldn’t have to be a Linux expert to use Ubuntu. If you have a NEW system particularly Dell D830 series or D630 series you may want to avoid trying Ubuntu until they get this fixed. If you are a glutton for punishment, then by all means read on. The drivers just simply don’t exist for this thing really. Well, they do but you are going to have to do some really ugly hacking. This is the first I have experience any problems what soever with the installation of Ubuntu. I have done about 10-20 installations with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and this is the first time I could not install from the hot disk. My solution?
WARNING!!: I do not guarantee this will work for you. This is only how I personally fixed the problem on my machine. I am not responsible for you running around hacking your system. If you follow the steps, you take your systems health into your own hands. Your computer could blow up!

Well, what I had to do , was download the DVD version of the iso. Then I had to install Ubuntu in ‘text’ mode. I rebooted but I still couldn’t get the gui up, even though it was working fine. I kept getting screen errors. That is to say, it was an IO error, which told me that it found screens but couldn’t use any of them because my machine wasn’t configured properly. So next I went to the following site, and followed the directions here. Here is how it works. If you have a wide screen you first have to enable it. I am assuming at this point you were able to install Ubuntu, you just don’t have a windows manager up yet.

1. You will need to run this code in command prompt. If you are having trouble figuring this out, you may have some problems. I know that isn’t proper ‘Help Desk’ kind of language, but I am not a help desk. If you need some additional help I can try, but pleas contact me via email, and we will work something out.
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel
The reason you want to do this is so that the xserver will handle your display options using an intel driver. At this point you will need to TELL your xserver to use the Intel driver. If you installed in ‘text’ mode you wont get this option. In fact, it will probably default over to Vesa, or something similar as a generic handler. Problem is that Vesa doesn’t or won’t or doesn’t very well, handle 3D graphics acceleration hardware. If someone has a different opinion please let me know, I’m just guessing at this point.

2. The next thing you will have to do is tell xorg/xserver to use the Intel driver. So we need to run a configuration option.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
When this runs you will be thrown into a sort of gui, and what you will be doing is telling xserver to use an appropriate driver. Make sure to highlight HERE so you can find the driver yourself.

Then Go through the listing and select ‘intel’ and click ok.

Follow the dialog prompts till the end, and restart your machine. At this point you should get a really fuzzy crappy looking gui. The reason for this is that we will need to add a specific driver for the system. This is done in the next step.

3. Now, you will need to navigate to the ubuntu support forums. Now you will have to have an Ubuntu user name and password to download the appropriate driver. I am sure there is probably other places where you can get this, and I could probably provide it here, but honestly, I don’t want to personally support it, nor can I vouch for its reliability. Intel Driver Here at Ubuntu Forum
Scroll on down the page and make sure to get the driver. Now Voland666 also provides his configuration set ups. I personally did not have to do this, but you might want to look through them to see if anything applies to you.

4. Once you have downloaded the ‘deb’ file to your desktop, all you have to do is ‘double-click’ on it, and the installer with do the rest. Restart your machine and you should have very nice graphics rendering.

5. One final step. For super crisp font rendering lets do this. Click on System–>Preferences–>fonts. When the fonts dialogue comes open, select ‘Subpixel Smoothing (LCDS)’. Now you should be cooking with gas!