Tag Archives: bugs

02/1/12

12.04 here I come…

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:

  1. Connect an External Monitor
  2. Boot into a LiveCD boot options (press a key when the first purple screen comes up)
  3. Select ‘noapic’ from the F6 boot options menu
  4. Boot into Ubuntu, and Install (the secondary monitor should be the only one working)
  5. Reboot after installation, hold down Shift after BIOS to get to GRUB and add ‘noapic’ into the boot options
  6. Once in Ubuntu, download and install the right kernel .deb files from
    http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/drm-intel-fixes/
  7. 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!

01/7/12

One step forward, two steps back…

I’ve been following the development of Ubuntu 12.04 with interest, hoping that it would fix the annoying bug that affects the i7 chip in my laptop. In brief, the bug forces me to set the ‘noapic’ flag in the boot options before the machine will boot correctly. After a number of weeks of testing the live disk occasionally, I can happy report that the ‘noapic’ flag is no longer needed to book Ubuntu 12.04 on a ThinkPad L520 (with the SandyBridge i7).

But….

Now there is a new, and even more annoying bug which I have to wait to be fixed. Unlike the one above, which I could get around using a boot flag, I haven’t found a work-around for this one yet.

My primary laptop monitor doesn’t work.

When I boot into 12.04, the system boots correctly, but all I get is a black screen. I’ve plugged in an external monitor, and it displays without an issue on that, but it’s a laptop, so that’s not a practical solution. There are no extra drivers that I know of to be installed. I’m completely stuck, and unless it gets fixed, I’m not upgrading any time soon.

I have posted a bug, if you’ve any experience with this sort of thing, please take a look and see if you can help me:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/912992

06/17/11

Annoying Unity bug – non-maximized windows move when switching workspaces

As much as I love Unity, there is a bug which has been around since the beginning and is really starting to annoy me. If you have any experience getting bugs noticed and fixed, can you please take a look for me?

The bug is: Bug #755842 “Non-maximized windows which sit on the border of a workspace move when called”

The bug works as follows:

  1. Put a non-maximized window against the border of your workspace
  2. Switch to the adjoining workspace
  3. Select the window in the Unity Launcher
  4. Expected Behavior

    1. You are switched back to the workspace with the window
  5. What actually happens
    1. You stay in the current workspace AND the window is shifted slightly into the current workspace
    2. Making it impossible to use without manually switching to the workspace and dragging the window back to where it was

I also have screenshot instructions too:

  1. Put an application window hard against the side of your workspace without maximizing it
    Bottom right workspace: http://rc.id.au/f/images/1-window-move-bug.png
    All workspaces: http://rc.id.au/f/images/2-window-move-bug.png)
  2. Go to a different workspace which shares an edge with your application
    Top right workspace: http://rc.id.au/f/images/3-window-move-bug.png
  3. Click on the application within the launcher, and the application will jump a little way into the next workspace
    Top right workspace after clicking on XChat and Gwibber launcher icons: http://rc.id.au/f/images/4-window-move-bug.png
  4. To show this more, I reset the windows to their original locations from #1, went into the bottom left workspace and clicked on Gwibber again: http://rc.id.au/f/images/5-window-move-bug.png

If you can do something to help get this fixed, I would really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Non-maximized windows which sit on the border of a workspace move when called