Jimmy’s Blog

I experiencing random screen distortion & flicker after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04, I’m using Acer Notebook.
After searching in internet, there’s many forum thread & bug report discuss about this but mostly they have different hardware.
Finally I tried this method and no flickering so far.

What I do is I change my grub configuration, adding kernel parameter “i915.powersave=0”.

For Linux expert probably this is not an issue, so I dedicate this step for the newbies like

1. What I do is I modify the grub configuration which is located on /boot/grub/grub.cfg (backup before you edit it)
2. Because the access right is set to read only, let’s change it so the owner can modify it.
   > sudo chmod -c u+w /boot/grub/grub.cfg
3. Use vi or your other prefered editor to edit it.
   > sudo vim /boot/grub/grub.cfg
4. Locate the menuentry of your Linux. Example:
   menuentry ‘Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-22-generic’ –class ubuntu –class gnu-linux –class gnu –class os {
   recordfail
   insmod ext2
   set root=’(hd0,4)’
   search –no-floppy –fs-uuid –set xxx-xxx-xxx
   linux /vmlinuz-2.6.32-22-generic root=UUID=xx-xx-xxx-x-xx ro quiet splash
   initrd /initrd.img-2.6.32-22-generic
   }
5. Add “i915.powersave=0” to the linux kernel line as parameter. It will become:
   menuentry ‘Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-22-generic’ –class ubuntu –class gnu-linux –class gnu –class os {
   recordfail
   insmod ext2
   set root=’(hd0,4)’
   search –no-floppy –fs-uuid –set xxx-xxx-xxx
   linux /vmlinuz-2.6.32-22-generic root=UUID=xx-xx-xxx-x-xx ro i915.powersave=0 quiet splash
   initrd /initrd.img-2.6.32-22-generic
   }
6. Save & restart to check if you still experiencing screen flicker

That’s it
Hope it can work on other Notebook/PC

If you find that copying from your Windows Vista extremely slow  (50KB/s) from wifi you must try this.

Go to your device manager: (continue reading…)