Having installed Ubuntu 10.4 on my Vostro 3300, I hooked it up on my home made docking station… a belkin usb hub with wireless keyboard and mouse and a 20″ external monitor.
Everything seem to work ok – until I noticed that the monitor image was on a continuous flickering/wavy pattern. Searching on the web for similar problems, I found that the same issue had been found by several Vostro 3300 uses. I should note at this point that my laptop has an intel graphics card.
Most of the post suggested either to upgrade to a more recent kernel (Ubuntu 10.4 comes with 2.6.32-24) or to set modeset to 0. None of it worked.. I tried upgrading up to 2.6.36 and also booting the Maveric Beta from a CD with no success. I also figure out that you set modeset=0 by editing /etc/default/grub (sudo vi /etc/default/grub) and update the following line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”i915.modeset=0 “. The run sudo update-grub and reboot.. unfortunately this frooze my laptop – so don’t bother trying 🙂
Eventually, I decided that I needed help, after asking around Sarvatt at freenode’s #Ubuntu-x found the upstream bug report that matches my issue – https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28306
Unfortunately, this means that the issue is still unfixed and my monitor still flickering… Can you help? 🙂
Victor Tuson Palau's Blog 
hey, i’m still waiting for this bugfixing. I know a patch has been released recently (jan 2011) but needs some kernel recompiling.
I need my external monitor to work properly!
Any news?
Depends for what release you are talking about. I think is has missed the boat for 10.04.2 but should be in an SRU shortly after that.
i’ve installed 10.04 LTS (the one certified, sic!)
do I have to go further?
I’ve move up to 10.10 but the upstream bug is still not fix. note that this is a problem with all Linux distros. I am running -proposed in my computer so I will let you know when an update is available.
do you have to move further than 10.04 , no – just need to keep up with updates that will be prompted to you.
Hi,
I have the same problem. I have installed Ubuntu 11.04 and I have kernel 2.6.38. Is there any progress or hint how to fix it, please?
Regards,
Ondrej
not yet, you might want to watch this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/614238