Cottleston Pie

I recently had a very frustrating experience trying to install Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) on my old-but-sturdy ThinkPad T42p, and having found no other reports online, I thought I'd write it up.

The CD would boot fine, but (with either the Live CD or the "alternate" CD) when I tried to install, it briefly flashed up something like Starting syslog daemon..., and then the screen went blank, with not even a cursor or TTY, leaving the machine appearing to have crashed.

At first I thought it was a bad disc, or an iffy CD drive (these models are known for it), but after seeing the same result from a few more discs I decided it was more likely to be a video issue. The built-in F1 help was actually useful, and the upshot is that it all worked fine once I pressed F6 and added this to the boot line:

vga=771

A simple enter then had everything running as expected.

I also wondered whether this apparent hang/crash might have had something to do with the kernel modesetting introduced recently, but passing nomodeset to the boot line made no difference.

(Also curious to note, my admin section tells me that "Cottleston Pie has been active for 3 years, 3 months and 3 days". "In existence" might be fairer to say than "active".)