The other day I upgraded a mates laptop. By upgrade, I mean I removed Vista and installed Linux. Everything worked pretty well apart from the sound card, but this was fixed in a new kernel. Being that I’d used the only CD I had knocking about, I’d installed Mint Linux 7. No probs, I thought, I’ll just go through the upgrade process to version 8.
I did everything to the book, it all went well. Rebooted and then just hung. Thing is, it was actually working, I couldn’t see the screen or swap in to the terminals. After much rooting around I discovered it was the screen driver.
Editing xorg.conf, I thought I’d just pop in VESA and all would be well… how wrong was I. Turns out the Intel driver for the Intel cards can be pretty pants and to fix it is just to add this line to xorg.conf video driver section:
Option “NoAccel” “true”
Obviously you’ll be wondering how to get to be able to do this if you’re a newbie. When Linux boots, select recovery mode, from the menu select drop to root shell. Type “nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf”, then edit away.
Reboot and enjoy 😉