Comment 32 for bug 197514

I'm seeing pretty much the same behaviour as previously described. Environment is a GA-PCV2 Idot motherboard with VIA PC-1000 Samuel2/VT8235M/CLE233. None of the Ubuntu 8 or 9 versions which I have run get as far as a working GUI, even for the installer. I tested also with a PCI video card, which didn't work any better; I still got unwanted hangs and screen-driving failures. So.. I have to wonder if it's related to the CLE233 itself, or if there are other things happening around the chipset.

The text-based installers for 8.04 and 9.10 work to the extent of building a quite bootable system - which then hangs.

Thanks to André's comment, I tried recovery mode, which works!!! What a relief. startx from the recovery prompt brings up a stable desktop at 1024x768. I didn't have to do anything to configure that, which is an improvement from previous experiences with VIA chipsets. Interestingly, there is no xorg.conf in /etc/X11, so I guess that whatever I'm experiencing is a complete default. Screen painting is sufficiently slow that I wonder if it's totally unaccelerated and initialised in VESA mode, and that's why it's working. However I don't know how to prove that, and I'm happy to take suggestions.

I'm a complete newbie to *nix of any sort after 40 years of mainframes and other PC environments, so assume that I could be missing something simple through gross inexperience or incompetence! :-)