So I ordered my new system (in bits) from Lambdatek over the weekend and it all arrived on Tuesday which, considering it came in four batches via four different carriers is pretty good.
It's an Asus P5Q-VM motherboard, Intel quad core processor and 8Gb of memory with all other bits 'generic'. Ubuntu 8.10 beta installed without any problem at all, which is a good start. However.....
I sort of knew the Intel G45 graphics was probably a bit risky being so new, and I was right. To get it to run without X crashing I have to add 'Option "NoAccel"' to the device section of xorg.conf. It's a know problem and there is a fix out there which will appear in the Intel X drivers in due course. I don't really need the acceleration at the moment so I can wait.
However there is another minor problem, I can't get as high a display resolution as I want, the maximum I'm offered is 1152x864 and I normally run 1600x1200. The display is actually capable of more than that I think.
Currently I'm running the new (Ubuntu 8.10) system on the VGA input of my monitor and the old (Fedora 8) system on the DVI-D input of the monitor. I did try swapping them round but the the Ubuntu 8.10 system just failed to start video at all, I had to ssh into it to shut it down.
It looks as if the display/screen detection in the Intel X drivers is completely broken. The display is a Dell 2001Fp and is detected without any problems by the Fedora 8 system. How can I tell the Ubuntu systems X configuration all about my display without too much hassle? Is there any utility which will interrogate the display and spew out xorg.conf configuration parameters?