screen corruption on LMDE 2012-04 live cd x64

[ginjabunny]

I'm trying to install LMDE on my new Acer E1 core i5, I switched to legacy BIOS and it boots but when booting the terminal fonts are unreadable and it has horizontal lines all over the screen when X starts, at MDM and in Mate and CInnamon, it is readable and I started installing but it just seems to hang at some random point presumably when X crashes, I tried intel.modeset=0 in grub but still the same.
I dug around and found some older CDs and it works ok with LMDE 2011-09 Gnome x86, Ubuntu 10.04 x64 and LMDE 2011-9 XFCE x64 so am going to try and install that and put Cinnamon on later.

Any ideas how I get X to work? Even if I install an older version will the updates break it??

Any help would be appreciated.

GB

[cwsnyder]

I am assuming that you have an Intel graphics system? Have you tried nomodeset in grub, or does it help at all?

For nVidia, changing the driver from or to the proprietary driver can help in this kind of problem. With an Intel graphics system, the free driver usually doesn't have this type of problem reported. Since you are having this type of problem, I wouldn't want to guarantee that an upgrade would not also break the graphics. You might search for reported problems with your graphics subsystem and see if there are any work-arounds.

On my desktop system, for example, the Live Cinnamon Mint 14 DVD display is unreadable with bright yellow text on white background except in a terminal window, but I can download nvidia-current to get the graphics system to work.

You can also look into KDE which uses a different compositor than Mate or Cinnamon, and I have had luck with Kwin when Compiz breaks. (Or use a desktop which doesn't require a compositor.)

[ginjabunny]

@cwsnyder cheers for the info.

I did install the old XFCE version of LMDE then upgraded to UP6 themn put Cinnamon on, but all the way through I was getting sporadic lock-ups where the whole laptop would just freeze and I'd have to turn it off so after about a dozen of those I gave up and put Mint 14.1 on and it seems to be working fine at the moment, will have another try at LMDE when the next respin is released which I think is this or next month.

I think the problem with the "current" respin of LMDE (2012-04) is hardware support, so buying a brand new laptop probably has hardware which is not supported in that version, pity there is no fallback mode or maybe there is but I don't know what it is, strange that older versions don't seem to have the problem.

[zerozero]

i believe that in some way bug 680737 (and a couple more associated) are related with your problem