Lubuntu long boot on Inspiron 1525

Problem

I installed Lubuntu 18.04, the LXDE variant of Ubuntu, on an old Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop. It worked, but every bootup would take several long minutes.

Solution

Turns out that this is a known problem for this Dell laptop reported here. I followed these steps:

• Opened Grub config file:

$ sudo vi /etc/default/grub

• Change the Grub commandline option to be:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=SVIDEO-1:d"

• Update Grub and reboot:

$ sudo update-grub
$ sudo reboot

Boot time dropped dramatically to about a minute after this change.