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I've had my Thinkpad T420 (integrated graphics, 8GB RAM, i5) for less than a month. I couldn't successfully install Natty (installer finished, but wouldn't boot), so I went with Maverick instead. On a daily basis, it completely freezes at least once, seemingly always when I'm in Firefox with multiple tabs open. My mouse can still move, but nothing is clickable, and I always have to do a hard restart.

I confirmed that this isn't a Unity bug, because I installed 10.10 in "command-line only" mode via the alternate install dvd, and manually installed X-server and fluxbox. The freezing still exists, without Unity or even Gnome running, whenever I do anything mildly resource-hungry in Firefox.

Thanks for any guidance.

Stefano Palazzo
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oskar
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  • Does it depend on whether you are browsing flash content or not? – htorque May 10 '11 at 18:10
  • No, I do not have Flash installed. – oskar May 10 '11 at 18:12
  • According to Phoronix Sandy Bridge support is broken on 11.04: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_snb_natty&num=1 I'd recommed using vesa drivers until 11.10 – Seppo Erviälä Jun 24 '11 at 11:04
  • You can also get the newest intel drivers from git and compile them yourself. This seems to work http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_snbsds_compare&num=1 – Seppo Erviälä Jun 24 '11 at 11:06

2 Answers2

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I have had my T420 for just over a week and am experiencing multiple problems with it. I initially installed Ubuntu 11.04 32bit which installed fine, but would crash several times each day. So I switched to the classic interface, but still was experiencing the type of anomaly that you describe; the mouse pointer moves, but the interface is completely unresponsive to mouse clicks.

I then decided to install 11.04 64bit since I will be upgrading the RAM soon. This install also went fine and soon had my system up and running. Unity still crashed frequently, so I switched to classic mode. However, this time I chose classic mode without effects. I have not experienced any crashing or locking up in the three days since I made this change.

I would recommend that you try installing Natty again, but try running it in classic mode without effects until some of these bugs get worked out. I also recommend adding information to the bugs that have been already filed on Launchpad and also open new bug reports for problems that have not already been reported.

Dennis VanMeter
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  • I appreciate the input. I tried installing Natty twice but both times it boots to a black screen and stays that way. I'm using the alternate disc with LVM encryption (not optional for me). I really hope these bugs get fixed soon; it was a pretty big expense for me. Too late to return. Anyway thanks again. – oskar May 11 '11 at 02:25
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I had the same or at least a similar issue with natty 64bit installed on a thinkpad L520 (sandy bridge, too). It didn't boot and showed only flickering green lines. Well, I found a solution by looking at the Grub2 documentation on a German Ubuntu site. There I stumbled over the following sentence: "if there are boot problems with the default grub2 settings (black or distorted screen), then you should choose the following setting. With this setting a list of problematic graphic cards ("blacklist") is processed during boot." (rough translation) So I added the following line in /etc/default/grub (open the file with sudo or gksudo):

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text

saved it and ran:

sudo update-grub

Now booting just runs fine.

Best wishes, absurd

absurd
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  • Do you know a way to run that in the installer? I haven't been able to get past that step, so I have no grub to update... – Stephen RC Jul 06 '11 at 11:04