James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
James Sperbeck wrote:
Thank you Carl, Jim and Gus for being there at the Technical Book Store
yesterday, where I really needed help.
My wife replaced her ten year old computer. We tried out two different
ones with Vista from Fry's , but both crashed
and she really didn't like the "feel" of the mail and browser programs.
After two weeks, I returned both computers,
convincing her Ubuntu was the ticket. I bought a Dell computer with
Ubuntu 7.1 factory installed. "Envelope" filled
You mean "Evolution".
the bill of being close to what Outlook had been. Home life was good
again, until last week, when I upgraded to
Ubuntu 8. Disaster struck! It booted erratically. My life was plagued by
old suspicions that I had again screwed up
with Linux. I was ready to make a fresh install.
Yesterday,Gus worked for two hours to identify my problem, caused by Dell, and
entered
solutions. A fresh install was not needed. All data was saved. I came home
triumphantly.
Life is good! BZ Gus.
Is there a case study worth recapping there? Specifics worth remembering?
When in doubt, revert to the command line. Get rid of all GUI-ness and
look at your startup messages. And get root. Ubuntu defaults to not
having a root password and sudo was broken. I had to boot the system to
single user mode and create a root password so I could get in, explore
and fix things.
In this case the Ubuntu desire to hide everything from the user made it
very difficult to do troubleshooting. It wasn't until I hacked the grub
command line to reveal what was going on that the problem became apparent.
In this case the system was a Dell Inspiron that shipped originally with
Ubuntu 7.1 and a PATCHED 2.6.22 kernel. The patch was for the SATA
controller, which has a known (to Dell) race condition so that it
normally fails in IDE mode without the patch. The other mode is RAID
mode but for some reason that doesn't work either. The SATA modes are
set in the BIOS.
The system was upgraded in place from Ubuntu 7.1 to Ubuntu 8.04.
Fortunately, this kept the old 2.6.22 kernel. Unfortunately, it got rid
of the NVIDIA proprietary video drivers because Ubuntu does an upgrade
and not an install of those drivers.
The fix was to edit the /etc/grub/menu.lst (grub.conf on Fedora/Redhat)
file to force the system to boot the 2.6.22 kernel by setting the
default. For the video I made the system use the VESA driver at
1024x768. The screen is a little distorted because the monitor is a
wide-screen but it's not really noticeable unless you look for it.
If Ubuntu does a kernel upgrade the problem might be fixed. If so, then
the nvidia-glx-new package can be installed. If the video gets to be a
real problem then the proprietary drivers can be installed from the
vendor provided software but that will ruin the packaging.
Gus
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