Comment 161 for bug 509273

Just downloaded and tried a daily live CD, booted from it and chose 'Try Ubuntu without installing'. Here are the results:
- straight boot (no extra options): black screen, vertical coloured lines, hangs
- with 'nomodeset': black screen, vertical coloured lines, hangs
- with 'pci=nomsi': black screen, vertical coloured lines, hangs

There were loads of updates over the last 24hrs, including several to gnome/gdm components and to Xserver-core and the ATI and Radeon driver. Before those I could at least get into my system via 'recovery mode (with nomodeset of course) > resume boot > login > startx'. That is now broken. Are you still telling me that Xserver and ATI / Radeon driver are not involved? Kernel didn't change since I last used the desktop fine yesterday (though getting there through the backdoor)
As of today I can not use that workaround anymore, neither a 'normal' boot (gdm busted, won't let me login), neither the live CD.

Funny, I've been running this laptop with XP (works), Jaunty (worked great) and Karmic (worked). Since last week Lucid has become one big regression. KMS, devicekit, gdm, plymouth all cause headaches. Not a good start for a LTS release!

I will try the alternative CD to perform a complete reinstall, and see if that fixes anything. If not, I'm going to look for another OS. Something reliable. I expect many newcomers to do the same: "does not work out of the box".

Tom