We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

Rebooting can be an exciting experience when tracking the bleeding edge of Ubuntu development.  Today, after installing the latest round of updates (including a new kernel, the latest grub 2, and all sorts of other important things, I rebooted.  A few things happened:

• My system failed to boot at first, because grub.cfg had been updated to use search --no-floppy, which wasn’t supported by the version of GRUB actually living in my MBR. I think it might be nicer if something as critical as a boot loader were more forgiving about this sort of thing, but at least GRUB’s interactive editor makes this easy to work around at boot time. A grub-install /dev/sda from single-user mode should fix it permanently.
• I noticed the console being set to graphics mode very early, signaling the arrival of kernel mode setting.  When the X server started up, it did so without any flickering, creating a smooth transition from startup into the login screen.
• Presumably due to the above, my displays started to behave differently, with the external LCD set to its native mode (1920×1200) and the internal one set to its native mode (1680×1050), with the latter displaying an offset picture (much of the login screen was “off the edge” of the display)

I was hoping to see the lightning-fast resume times I’d observed in some KMS demos, but it still takes a few seconds on my system.  At least it still works, with all this change.  Onward and upward!