Tag: Linux

I’m affected by Bug #48773, which, if I understand it correctly, means that my Nforce2 motherboard’s BIOS (the latest, FN45S00W from Shuttle) doesn’t treat the shutdown signal like it should, leaving all USB devices powered on. Windows (XP) isn’t affected or maybe it has a workaround – possibly something similar to the one presented over at Launchpad and Kernel Bug Tracker.

My setup doesn’t have annoyingly bright lights, but I do have one particularly troublesome issue related to this problem: my USB keyboard doesn’t seem to be able to wake up when I turn the power back on. I have to unplug and replug it in order to resurrect it. There is a weird performace issue in Windows when I hook it up into the PS2 port with an adapter, so I’d rather keep it plugged in as a USB device. But I may have to reconsider, since an official fix for the issue is considered unlikely.

After installing Ubuntu 7.10 I could see it was still suffering from the annoying little bug all previous versions have: instead of the neat splash screen during booting, all I got was the LCD’s warning sign saying “Input not supported”.

After finding rest of the shiny new OS very likeable I decided to solve this problem at last. It was safe to proceed on this bold assumption that I could, because in all Ubuntu installations I’ve done the problem has not manifested itself until the first booting into the freshly-installed system. That is to say, the live CD does not have this problem, but displays the splash with no problems, so I knew there must be a way to make it work.

There was a helpful link on the Ubuntu Forums on how to fix a faulty splash screen. In the end, it was simply a matter of finding the right display mode -describing parameters for a couple of config files. As for the parameters, I initially tried to find them from the live CD, but apparently it’s using a different system from the one used by an installed Ubuntu (GRUB), so this path turned out to be harder than a simple trial and error.

First I tried a full-blown 1280×1024 pixels with 16.8M colors, which is the display mode that the desktop starts in and works just fine, but that didn’t work – which I probably could have guessed from the fact that the other config file, usplash.conf, already had this resolution.

Then I thought about the way Windows XP boots on this system: the logo looks a bit crude, as if with a lower resolution and color depth than on the desktop. So I tried 800×600 with a modest 256 colors – and already on the way down Ubuntu now displayed the splash screen! The reboot revealed final success: the splash screen now works.

To be short but exact, what I did to make it work was:

1. sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
   so that at the very end of the first kernel line, after “splash” , I added
    vga=771
   – this corresponds to the SVGA mode of 800×600 pixels with 256 colors.
2. sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf
   so that
   xres=800
yres=600
3. sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`