ThinkPad Ubuntu 12.10 Savage driver not working

Question

When I upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10 the display does not work. Reading posts from other distros they claim the savage driver is now broken. I've tried installing other Debian based distros and they all fail to start X. Once X starts it dies and get no screen.

My ThinkPad is a T22 and I rely on several of them. Many older ThinkPads use the Savage video chipset and now many Linux distros won't work on them. Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

On a savage s3 graphics card (S3 VT8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266]) the vesa-driver is still working. You have to create your own etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Peter"
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Ientifier      "SavageBla"
    Driver         "vesa"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Default Screen"
    Device         "SavageBla"
    Monitor        "Peter"
EndSection

You can use the device, but don't expect any graphics acceleration.

Answer 2

Ubuntu 12.10 uses xorg-server 1.13 which drops support for legacy XAA 2D acceleration and breaks many old display drivers including the savage driver.

As no developers have volunteered to upgrade the savage driver your only option is to use a distribution with xorg-server 1.12 or older. I'd suggest that you stick with Ubuntu 12.04 which uses xorg-server 1.11.