A full description of my natty-installation difficulty here can be found at https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+question/158859. Please refer there for a full description of the relevant hardware. In summary, it's a Clarkdale-based desktop system with a multitouch display and wireless keyboard and mouse.
First, I seem to need nomodeset in the kernel, or it completely fails to start. Sometime in DRM setup the screen goes into a nifty color flashy mode with alternating full screen colors, red, green, blue, and white. This is very surprising to me, because this is not old hardware. I was under the impression that nomodeset was all about rather old hardware. Then with nomodeset, X has some errors, most critically, a failure of mtdev_open, which then causes the server not only to report an error, but to segfault. Even the failsafe config crashes this way...which makes it a rather bad failsafe! I get terminals but no X, and installation halts. I'm a little tweaked that "Couldn't open mtdev" is the error; that's pretty impossible to diagnose. Is there any way to coerce the mtdev library to be a little more helpful and say *why* it "couldn't" open mtdev? Nothing in the kernel boot messages seems relevant. Suppose that there is a fix, and it lands in the natty archive. Even then, how do I install my system? Is there a way for the natty install CD to work when graphics are borked? There's clearly a bug here (X should never crash), and another bug (failure to open mtdev [whatever exactly that means] shouldn't inhibit failsafe startup), and another bug (mtdev shouldn't be unopenable). At least, that's what it seems like to me. Oh, and another bug/feature-request (installation CDs should support non-graphical modes).
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