There is something wrong with the binary nvidia drivers that ubuntu is using. They are broken. This came to a head when i tried to upgrade my laptop to kde 4.6 and at the same time I moved to the binary driver.
Which I should not have done. The nouveau (open source) driver has been stable on the laptop for ever…. (Sony VPCF135FG if you need to know) but the binary just blanks the screen.
Then can’t boot to a terminal to use “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg”. Then a tested iso of kubuntu 11.04 alpha will not display a screen.
Have been able to boot using Mint Debian Rolling Release (LMDE). Backing up the /home directory, then will install… comments later.
Linux Mint Debian did not boot well… will go for raw debian testing.
Aptosid is now working fairly well. I have removed firefox, installed chromium and claws-mail, and manually installed libreoffice (from the debs on the website — libreoffice is not on the sid repository yet).
Using xfce is fast, responsive… and it is rolling.