I have just installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Alpha 6 on my Dell Inspiron 2600 (Intel 830M graphics, 256mb ram)

I used the alternate install disc due to lack of RAM and concerns that my graphics chipset would not be recognised. It turned out that the graphics were still not recognised, and after some playing with the exciting new recovery mode and a lot of googling I found out that I needed to downgrade the bios to version A08 I2600A08 due to the way the chipset was initialised.

I downloaded this on another Windows machine and found it required a floppy drive to unpack to. I investigated Dell biosdisk scripts but these only created a disk image by copying the unpacked files into a freedos floppy image and the downloaded exe wouldn't unpack except directly to a floppy (or removable device 1.44mb in size). So I used Virtual Floppy Drive and burnt the contents to a bootable CD-R with Nero. To my amazement this worked and now I had downgraded my bios.

I started up Ubuntu again and found the screen still lit up with crazy lines and garbled nonsense at the graphical login. I learned that Hardy now relies on xorgs improved hardware autodetection instead of it's own scripts to write to xorg.conf. However it didn't seem to be working, perhaps because something had already decided what my hardware was before I upgraded the bios. I didn't fancy trying a time-consuming reinstall from scratch, so after another round of forum searching and dead ends I found all I had to do was specify the i810 driver in the Device section of my x11 configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf from the root prompt:

from:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
EndSection


to:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
Driver "i810"
EndSection


Now everything is working perfectly and I'm surprised how snappy Gnome is with only 256mb of RAM. I even have compiz effects!