Comment 10 for bug 509273

Having trouble with KMS too, starting about 4 weeks ago. First blamed Plymouth, but although there are issues there as well, I'm now sure that this is a separate problem. (see also bug 519891).

Problem comes and goes, about half the time I can boot normally and get into my system fine. The other times the system gives me a pattern of vertical coloured lines and is unusable. Hard reboot and adding 'nomodeset' to the grub linux-line does give me a usable system.

This is a Dell Latitude 131L, AMD64, Lucid with all updates applied at least once a day (usually twice a day).
From lspci:
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200M]
From grub.cfg:
menuentry "Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-13-generic" {
        recordfail
 insmod ext2
 set root=(hd0,5)
 search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 46062d1f-f00c-4276-9ff1-541279640a93
 linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-13-generic root=UUID=46062d1f-f00c-4276-9ff1-541279640a93 ro quiet splash
 initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-13-generic
}

I insert the 'nomodeset' right before the 'quiet splash'

There are plenty of systems out there with this chip, and installing Lucid will break them as it is now. This should be concerned important, probably critical.

If I can do more to help get this fixed, please ask.

cheers
Tom