Help Me LiveJournal, You Are My Only Hope

[rozk]

This is actually a two-machine household - and my Beloved uses a Compaq laptop on which she has Ubuntu loaded. She downloaded the latest Upgrade (10.04) which took ages first to download and then to install. When she obeyed the instruction to restart, the machine got to the Ubuntu opening screen and then crashed - it still does this, sometimes showing a pattern of vertical lines first. If you interrupt and go to the machine's startup menus, there are a number of kernels she does not know what to do with - and I know less.

Any thoughts? We are in Hackney, and will feed, buy drink, dedicate poems etc. for help.

Comments

[jiawen]

Choosing different kernels, in my experience, doesn't affect much, but it also shouldn't cause harm. There should also be a safe boot mode; has she tried that? And failing that, she could try to boot into a non-graphical mode, which won't be pretty but it'll make it possible to download needed drivers, etc.

Unfortunately, once she has 10.04 installed, she won't be able to choose different versions (9.04, 8.10, etc.) from within the boot menu. Does she have a live disc for one of the other versions? That would a) help her be able to boot it up and b) possibly give her information as to whether it's a version-specific problem.

It sounds likely (from my limited experience) that it's a conflict between her graphics card and 10.04. If true, that will probably be solvable by downloading better drivers and possibly tweaking the xconf file.

Have you check the Ubuntu forums? They're usually full of useful information.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

It's almost certainly the video drivers. She's almost certainly got an Nvidia video card in her laptop, and because Nvidia won't release free software drivers (or even the spec) for their cards, they tend to fall over whenever you do an update (incidentally, 10.4 isn't the latest version, 10.10 is - I'm not sure if that was just a typo on your part or what, but she might want to get 10.10).

It's possible that this can be fixed by upgrading the linux headers to match the new kernel version - just do:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

That can be done on the command line, which can probably be got to in the startup menu using a 'safe mode' option or something (I don't know exactly, because I'm using Debian, which is subtly different).

However, it *may* be that even that doesn't work. If so, download the current Linux Nvidia drivers from the links here - http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122606 . Then follow these steps - http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10075666&postcount=45 (they should all be followed from command-line mode). That *should* fix it...

If you need any more help, or if you have trouble understanding the instructions in that last link, I can be contacted at andrew @ thenationalpep.co.uk or via Twitter. I do GNU/Linux stuff for an Incredibly Big Megacorporation as my day job, so I probably know what to do in most troubleshooting situations.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Not sure it's the graphics card because it does search for drives before crashing...

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Upgrading the linux headers did not work - and it was 10.04

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

My first suggestion then would be to update to 10.10 , as the chances are any bugs will be fixed in that. Otherwise, try the updating of the drivers...

[lovingboth]

Is there any data that needs to be saved, i.e. is /home on a different partition?

[squigglefish.livejournal.com]

That patterning of lines is the exact issue I had about a month back when I updated my debian sid install. Since Ubuntu is a bit behind, I think they've ended up with the update I had back then.

To put it simply, I believe it was a bug between the kernel and the nvidia drivers.The reason you see it search for drivers and things before the fault is that the issue is happening when X is trying to start into opengl mode or something. I could load up the old kernel fine, and a couple of days later further updates came out that fixed things. When you boot into old kernel versions, you should still be able to update, so just keep on doing that until it gets patched out.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

We managed an install on disc and everything is OK for the moment.

Our thanks to everyone.