Comment 19 for bug 372028

I just experienced this problem again, this time with the 2.6.31-19-generic kernel.

I booted, saw the Dell BIOS splash screen, saw a little piece of text that said GRUB, and then a blank black screen (backlight did not appear lit, but this is not always the case) and nothing else. I had to hold down the power button to cut the power, turn the laptop back on; and this second time I saw Dell BIOS splash screen, the text that says GRUB, and then the GRUB boot menu (because I interrupted the boot process the previous time by holding down the power button.) I selected the 2.6.31-19-generic kernel, briefly saw a cursor blink in the upper left of the screen, and then saw a splash screen with a plain white Ubuntu logo (no wording and no progress bar.) After a few seconds, that transitioned to the splash screen with the word Ubuntu and a progress bar, followed by the login screen.

Again, notice that the difference here was that things seem to work properly when I go through the GRUB boot menu?

I would also like to ask what generates those two splash screens? Are they both generated by xsplash? Is the first (without the progress bar) generated by xsplash and the second (with the progress bar) generated by gdm?

Because I experienced the problem immediately prior to the first splash screen, knowing that may help troubleshoot, as if that splash screen is drawn using the Linux kernel framebuffer, we know to look there, rather than in the xorg Intel userland driver.