I posted a couple of weeks ago about an issue I was having with my Thinkpad L520 being unable to load Ubuntu 12.04 on the primary monitor.
I reported a bug in Launchpad, which was copied across to the bug tracker for Xorg. With some debugging help from the fantastic Bryce Harrington and Daniel Vetter I discovered that the bug I am encountering has been fixed in a Kernel branch as it is a common fault for the sandybridge graphics my laptop has. So now I have a laptop which will support running 12.04!
All of that said, the bug that I thought had gone away in 12.04 has appeared again. So I still need the ‘noapic’ flag to boot, but that’s better than not booting at all 
I have a bug report for this if anyone is interested.
So, the steps for getting Ubuntu 12.04 running on a Thinkpad L520 are:
- Connect an External Monitor
- Boot into a LiveCD boot options (press a key when the first purple screen comes up)
- Select ‘noapic’ from the F6 boot options menu
- Boot into Ubuntu, and Install (the secondary monitor should be the only one working)
- Reboot after installation, hold down Shift after BIOS to get to GRUB and add ‘noapic’ into the boot options
- Once in Ubuntu, download and install the right kernel .deb files from
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/drm-intel-fixes/ - Reboot
This method is installing a Mainline kernel build, so I recommend you read the documentation here first: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds
I’m off to run a backup and then upgrade to 12.04 on my primary hard drive. Wish me luck!
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