[clue-tech] Installfest - thanks to D&D yesterday - laptop up dual boot

[Bob Meetin]

Thanks to Dave Anselmi and David Willson for their patience - my laptop 
is now 'functional'.  I brought my older laptop to the clinic yesterday 
thinking it was a done deal to install Ubuntu and make it a dual boot.  
Wrong... We ran into a variety of problems losing the screen display.

After the initial install after I log into the window system no toolbars 
or icons would appear, only a movable cursor which was menu-less.  So I 
tried reinstalling and ran into inconsistent problems with the screen 
going black and if not that, then if I/we got to the partition disk 
function it would not allow the disk to be repartitioned to allow for 
another adjacent install.

The screen was intermittently going to a black screen which 
Control+Alt+F2 would sometimes revive.  Anyway, Dave A. was able to 
navigate through some log files and did some troubleshooting in single 
user mode.  He focused on X server modules (I think) and set up an upgrade.

I ran the upgrade this morning, but after rebooting it would again end 
up at the black screen akin to MS death, even after recovery mode if I 
would opt to resume after going through recovery.

On a hunch I did the recovery mode restart, then chose to go to a login 
prompt and logged in as regular user.  I attempted to start the window 
system manually by executing 'startx'.  It failed with a message that 
there was already an X server runnng at display:0 and complained about 
some .X file and X11 subdirectory in /tmp. 

I sudo to root and removed them, then exited root and by golly it 
initiated the window system and after login my laptop realized the true 
beauty of Ubuntu.  I rebooted once again but going through normal boot 
it failed once again I believe so next time around I chose the first 
recover mode selection and after going through recover mode I chose 
"resume normal startup" and it got to windows and all was well.  After 
that I was able to reboot normally without going through recovery mode 
and life is once again sweet.

I don't know that the upgrade had any effect on resolving the problem; 
maybe it was the xinit, xserver stuff all along - don't know.

Other note - I use Twitter regularly and I am now doing a lot of work 
with Joomla CMS.  I know a couple folks not on this group who are 
interested in starting a Colorado Joomla user group, perhaps a Twitter 
group, perhaps meetup style.  If you are interested come back to me. 

Thanks for the help.

-- 
Bob Meetin
www.dottedi.biz
303-926-0167

Hook up with me on www.Twitter.com/bobmeetin, Facebook, LinkedIn,
or catch my blog at www.dottedi.biz/blog.php

Standards - you gotta love em - there are so many to choose from!