Comment 2 for bug 995671

I am not sure this is a duplicate of 982710, the symptoms are different. No particular package was identified because it was not possible to get anything to work once the O/S booted from HD. Monitor is an Acer, chipset is Nvidia. After reporting the fault Ubuntu Studio 12.04 was tried, this worked from CD but did not even boot in a sensible time from the same hard disc.

A fresh copy of Linux Mint 12 was then installed, this works fine once started but it is based on the 2011 versions of Ubuntu. It has the same problem as Kubuntu 12.04 of upsetting the monitor for about 20 seconds ("invalid input format" error). This also happens when shutting down. Each of these O/S variants default to wide screen HD format at first. This is amateurish and can cause monitor damage for those still using CRTs. It won't help get Linux more widely accepted.

All these installations were on the same drive, for each one the root partition was reformatted. I also tried installing 12.04 into Vitualbox on a different drive, no 'invalid input format' error of course, but the O/S did not get going.

I use 10.04 LTS on all machines and drives, but was concerned that support will eventually cease now that 12.04 LTS is out. As an aside, Unity and Gnome 3 will not help the Linux cause, in my opinion. To me they are unusable, ugly, slow and look like an amateur interface. It took me a while to get Windows XP to look and work the way I wanted. Completely clear desktop and an unobtrusive launcher. Ubuntu with Gnome 2 sold me on Linux. Years ago I bought Red Hat 7 complete, not impressed.

If this is not sorted a lot of people will leave Ubuntu altogether, myself included. It is a shame after a number of good years.
Regards, Ron Lebar. Alpha Entek.