[clue-tech] Ubuntu lock-up problems

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Sun, 2009-02-01 at 11:19 -0700, Dennis J Perkins wrote:
> The problem appears to be somewhere in X.  The Arch Linux boot disk,
> which does not use X, never locked up.  The Ubuntu install disks for
> 8.04 and 8.10 lock up, using either Ubuntu or Kubuntu.  Fedora 10 locks
> up on the splash screen.

If you mean the multiple colored bars that go left to right during boot
on F10, I believe that's a frame buffer display and not X.  That could
mean that the kernel driver for your video chipset is not working
properly with your hardware.

You can exit the frame buffer splash on F10 by hitting any key.  I just
hold down the Ctrl or Shift key while the BIOS boot runs.  That should
get you a text mode only boot up.

> I cannot switch Kubuntu, which is installed, to VGA.  I found that there
> is no VGA driver.  I also tried VESA, and there is a VESA driver, but it
> won't run.  The fglrx driver fails too.  Only the radeon driver wants to
> run.

My bad.  The VGA driver is called "vesa".  It's a generic driver for
VESA standards that runs in basic 800x600 (might do 1024x768) in up to
24bit mode.  See "man vesa".

If vesa won't run I'd say either this isn't a video problem or you're
really hosed.  VESA is pretty much the bottom end, default fallback if
no other X video will work.

> I tried adding noacpi to the kernel options, but that doesn't help.

Assuming you can break out of graphical boot splashes, you should be
able to get to the command line in single user mode.  At that point,
you'd have to try and disable video drivers from the kernel.  I've never
had to do that so I don't know what the impact would be.

Honestly, if VESA doesn't work for you, I'm thinking the video card/chip
is fubar.  Unless you have some other device in the box on the PCI bus
that's causing some kind of conflict.  If so, start pulling those out
one at a time until the boot works.  Then you know the culprit.

> I added NoDRI to xorg.conf, and that doesn't matter either.

If VESA isn't working then DRI wouldn't matter.  Your X server never
started DRI with VESA.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org / http://www.graphics-muse.org
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