[clue-tech] Ubuntu questions

[Sean LeBlanc]

So I recently bought an HP laptop...last night I installed Ubuntu on it, and
things were going smoothly - I was able to follow instructions on the
ubuntuguide.org site to add dvd::rip, and verified that it worked - I
started ripping, and then canceled, and closed the lid.

I'm not sure if hibernate is not working or what, but when I woke back up,
no lights were on the box, and it appeared to have shut down. So I plugged
it in case battery was low, and powered up. 

And I cannot log into Ubuntu. The behavior (most times) is that it just
bounces right back to prompting for the username after it gives the password
(with a brief flash of the console first).  One time, while trying to login
as a normal user, I did get an error about being unable to write to disc. I
didn't enable root to login to GDM, either, so that fails as well.

I'm not sure what happened after I closed the lid, but I had restarted and
logged in several times successfully before this morning, so I'm puzzled by
this. 

So being new to Ubuntu and a little rusty with Linux (and FreeBSD) overall,
the first question I have is - how to get to a root login? I tried various
Ctrl-Alt-Fx but nothing I was doing got me over to another virtual console.

I supposed I could download and burn something like Knoppix and poke around,
but that seems a bit excessive. 

-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at comcast.net  
http://sean-leblanc.blogspot.com/
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. 
-Carl Sagan