Don't hesitate to upgrade your Ubuntu to lucid even with Intel GMA 500

It is painful to make Intel GMA 500 work with ubuntu. since there is no official display driver for it, you should use the 3rd party one, paulsbo driver. anyway, we shoshould be grateful to those people providing such driver. once you enabled it, I bet, you wouldn't modify it in case to cause unnecessary crash and trouble to use.

 

But how about new release from Ubuntu, the amazing build, lucid! Ignore it, just use the old one, karmic ?! As a technical user, you shoshould say no. That's your value! Just try, upgrade your Ubuntu!

 

On yesterday evening, I couldn't help upgrading my netbook, and spent one whole night to download all the packages and install them till the sun got up this early morning. after all finish, I reboot my tiny computer, and just to find it strike with its black face! Oh... I was sure I just wanted to kill myself for my own stupid upgrade... but what can I do next?

 

I began the long match for the damn intel gma500 ..............

 

Step 1:

 

All attempts to try to enter the recovery mode result in failure because of no menu displayed when grub started.

 

Step 2:

In a very causal case, I pressed ESC and found I entered the lucid! So excited that I download the shell scripts from website by 'wget started and executed it, then reboot the computer to get the black face again. and this time, however I pressed ESC, it is no use any more .....

 

Step 3:

I was so frustrated, and had no choice to install a new system say 9.10 .... success to install a fresh 9.10 In the same disk, but I don't want to give up my previous system since too applications installed in that system partition. I must to rescue it. I never give up!

 

Step 4:

Since a new OS installed to grub, now, the grub comes out! I can edit it and enter the lucid recovery mode ....

 

Step 5:

Enter the 'netroot' of recovery mode and remove all packages installed by that scripts downloaded from Internet

 

Step 6:

Install PSB driver according to the guide from wiki.ubuntu.com

# Sudo add-Apt-repository PPA: gma500/PPA & sudo apt-Get update

# Sudo apt-Get intall poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d poulsbo-config

 

# Sudo add-Apt-repository PPA: gma500/Fix & sudo apt-Get update

# Sudo apt-Get intall poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d poulsbo-config

 

Reboot

 

Step 7:

Unfortunately, when it started, it told me no window manager.

And all windows lacks of border, no window can be moved and the cursor is an X Cross...

Tail the syslog, I got the error: unable to find the provider 'compute' of required component for 'windowmanger'

 

 

Step 8 ~ 13

In these steps, I tried to install compiz and remove it again and again from recovery mode, but no use, only found one interesting thing that when I tried install compiz, all PSB driver component I installed in #5 wocould be removed, and after restart, no desktop anymore...

 

Step 14

I guess PSB driver must be not compatible with compiz. by Googling, I got to know the metacity. everything became good by running 'metacity -- replace ', but if this window closed, everything goes back. same problem as described at this link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/563161, and a workaround is to add this command in GNOME startup Application List so that it will be run every gnome star Ted. obviusly, it is just a work around. I don't like!

 

Step 15

Again, by Googling, I success to fix this problem by editing gnome configuration.

# Gconf-Editor

Set the value of windowmanager to be 'metacity 'In/desktop/gnome/session/required_component/

 

 

So far, it is Ubuntu lucid, and my desktop come back! I enjoy it, compared to karmic, these is no special albeit!

Don't hesitate to upgrade your Ubuntu to 10.04, go! Go! Go! You will find it is really interesting, finding problems and solving them!