blank screen

Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" was released a couple of days ago and I immediately installed it on my laptop, which is kind of my test lab for operating systems.

It looks good so far. Very smooth.

I only had one problem: the screen was completely black during boot and shutdown. I could only see a blank screen during startup or shutdown, and although I could still switch to the other consoles along with the fact that the boot splash screen isn't properly informative, the boot process was taking over 3 minutes. Unacceptable.

I searched Google and after tweaking the keywords once, I reached the golden combination: "gutsy gibbon blank screen during boot"

Turns out this is an already known bug in Gutsy and I quickly found out how to solve it, thanks to the folks at Launchpad:

1) Change the resolution in /etc/usplash.conf to 1280x800
2) Run "sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`"

Note that the 1280x800 resolution is the "default" resolution for my laptop's monitor - I have an Acer TravelMate 4001 WLMi, with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700. The resolution for your laptop's monitor may be different.

You may want to take a look at Xorg.conf or go to System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution to see what you should use in /etc/usplash.conf (assuming the installer correctly detected the supported resolutions, of course).