ubuntu laptop with Ati radeon mobility X1300. X session not resuming correctly

I have this old HP nc6400 which is gradually deteriorating. However it is pretty good for browsing the web, and taking to places where it might get nicked.

Unfortunately, at some point recently, either due to it developing a hardware issue, or that a kernel package upgrade or the graphics module upgrade has introduced a bug, and now there is a screen colour depth issue when it resumes from suspend.

So if you boot up and open a browser. It seems fine and images look like this...;


However if you allow the screen to go to sleep, either by some timeout, or by closing the lid. Once the machine is disturbed from sleeping, it appears that there is a colour depth problem.

After it has resumed it looks like this;



During troubleshooting, someone asked that I should send them my xorg.conf file. However I've not seen an actual one on the filesystem for some time, and I understand that the config is generated on the fly by introspection of the hardware.

As there is no default or generated xorg.conf on my installation, I tried generating one out using the "# Xorg -configure" command. This should produce a file in the local directory containing those values introspected from the system.

Unfortunately I get a seg fault when running the command;

# Xorg -configure

However the file it generates still seems to work once I copied it to the /etc/X11 directory.

Basically it looks like X11 needs the xorg.conf file to properly resume from suspend.