Comment 248 for bug 541511

If Ubuntu releases were held up by this kind of bug, Karmic wouldn't be out yet. I helped reinstall Jaunty for someone with an i845 that was locking up on Karmic, for example. And in retrospect, that system had graphical issues even before Jaunty, such as freezing on the splash screen until a VT switch on some releases, and a rare lockup that was unexplained at the time.

i8xx issues have been lurking behind the scenes for a long time now, and the factors that caused the bug to surface are complex. You might find a way to stop the freezing for yourself, but that doesn't mean it will work for other people, and it might even break someone's working setup. So there's really no good fix other than wait for upstream's final version of the fix to be committed. Which hopefully will happen soon. And then it will be backported to Lucid's kernel.