10.04 update fail, get a BusyBox v1.10.2 error

It looks like at start Ubuntu CD is unable to create a pseudo-disk in RAM.
When you talk of upgrade via a CD (method I never tried), do you follow what is described in
     https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LucidUpgrades#Upgrading%20Using%20the%20Alternate%20CD/DVD

Hi Delance :)

We have tried a LiveCd session of 10.04 and that works fine. Then we tried a fresh install from the LiveCd onto a new partition and that failed to boot-up. The grub2 found 9.10 and allowed the machine to boot into the 9.10 but not into the 10.04. So we fixed the Mbr to use the 9.10's grub1 and edited the menu.lst to include the 10.04 and again that wouldn't boot either. The 9.10 continues to boot-up easily.

sda1 the 9.10 has about 5Gb on an ext3 for / and uses the /home on sda5
sda4 the 10.04 has about 15Gb on an ext3 and doesn't use a separate /home
sda3 swap 3Gb and ram is 1.5Gb
sda2 Extended Partition 57Gb
 . sda5 the /home for the 9.10 has about 57Gb on an ext4

There is a 2nd hard-drive with a 19Gb Ubuntu and a swap but that doesn't seem to be involved with any of this.

Now when we try to boot up the 10.04 using the 9.10's grub1 we get an error message
" one or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted
swap: waiting for uuid press esc to enter recovery shell "
Earlier we tried the "blkid" command and got

/dev/sda1: UUID= "2a1bd870- e4ef- 4799- bc1a- 4c7855e0426a" SEC_ TYPE= "ext2" TYPE= "ext3"
/dev/sda3: UUID= "b5ebc8fb- d5b1- 4e82- a955- a109ea69468b" TYPE= "swap"
/dev/sda4: UUID= "40f391af- 0a10- 4fff- 9800- 801e05c70a7e" SEC_ TYPE= "ext2" TYPE= "ext3"
/dev/sda5: UUID= "1d6d79c4- 7b3b- 4fa2- 9bd1- 5b6c6c283980" TYPE= "ext4"
/dev/sdb1: UUID= "c164f22d- ff40- 4bd3- a251- e73b69918e11" TYPE= "ext2"

which appears to miss the swap on sdb5 strangely or it might have been just missed in the copy&paste as we were not interested in sdb at all at that stage.

I have a feeling that even if the swap gets sorted in the fstab then we will get back to 10.04 booting into busybox rather than the x-session. I couldn't remember the command for finding out which graphics card is being used, lsusb or something?

Thanks for replying
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

thanks for prompt response.

                sudo lshw | grep display -A 15
Not nice as command, but works! (display hardware config, find line with "display" and display 15 following lines)

after inputting your command I got the following:

" *-display UNCLAIMED
                description: VGA compatible controller
                product: Radeon RV200 QW [Radeon 7500]
                vendor: ATI Technologies Inc
                physical id: 0
                bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
                version: 00
                width: 32 bits
                clock: 66MHz
                capabilities: agp agp-2.0 pm bus_master cap_list
                configuration: latency=32 mingnt=8
                resources: memory:e0000000-e7ffffff(prefetchable) ioport:9000(size=256) memory:ed000000-ed00ffff memory:ec000000-ec01ffff(prefetchable)
        *-network
             description: Wireless interface
             product: AR2413 802.11bg NIC
             vendor: Atheros Communications Inc."

being a newbie it means nothing to me, but hopefully it's vital info to you guys. Thanks for quick response :)

We tried a fresh install from the LiveCd onto a new partition and that failed to boot-up.
We fixed the Mbr to use the 9.10's grub1.
We edited the menu.lst.

sda1 the 9.10 has about 5Gb on an ext3 for / and uses the /home on sda5
sda4 the 10.04 has about 15Gb on an ext3 and doesn't use a separate /home
sda3 swap 3Gb and ram is 1.5Gb
sda5 the /home for the 9.10 has about 57Gb on an ext4
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The swap is not listed in blkid, which is probably normal. If I remember, Linux manage by default only one swap.
Sharing /home between two release could lead to problems, if softwares in both release are of different version.
I think it should be only temporary.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can you post /etc/fstab of 10.04 ?

Hi :)

So, back-up the fstab and check to see your back-up is there by doing

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.310510
ls /etc/fsta*

or

cd /etc
sudo cp fstab fstab.310510
ls fsta*

The * is a wildcard so "ls" should show a LiSt of all the files in /etc that start with the letters "fsta". The "cp" command should have created a CoPy of "fstab" and called it "fstab.310510". I always find it helpful to give backups a date-stamp at the end rather than just use ".bak" or something; just to give me a rough idea of which one might be the one i am looking for when i see a list of different backups from following different people's advice in forums and stuff. Note that the "cp" command does not normally need to be "sudoed" and it is well worth avoiding using sudo whenever possible because it can mess up permissions for files. In this case we are dealing with a file that can only be messed around with by "sudo" so it's ok.

This command will allow you to open fstab to have a look and copy&paste it into here

gedit /etc/fstab

but because fstab is a system-file and is in a system-folder it wont allow you to save any changes. To save changes you would need "sudo" in front of gedit. Also note that if you prefer using a different text-editor then just replace gedit in that line with which-ever text-editor you can use instead. Gedit is the default one for the Gnome DE. The G at the font is the clue there. Ubuntu uses Gnome and therefore Gedit just as Kubuntu uses KDE and therefore Kate. There are lots of other text-editors for each of the different platforms but only a few work on both without drawing in a lot of other "dependencies". Anyway at the moment it is safer NOT to save any changes to fstab as it is a critical file and easy to mess up so opening it in read-only mode prevents careless accidents. It is a neat way of protecting your system and i tend to use this way of "scouting out" possible problems before deciding on how to try to solve the problem.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Hi again :)

@ Delance
The 10.04 does NOT share the /home. At the moment only the 9.10 uses the /home because the 10.04 is unusable anyway. When we find how to get 10.04 working then a reinstall will make a new 10.04 the only one using the separate /home partition. Only the swap partition is being shared. At the moment the /home for the 10.04 is on the same partition as the /, so all of 10.04 is on sda4

@ Vmf007
The output showed us that you are using an Ati graphics cards and from the version numbers i think it's an even older card than the 1650 one i am using. I don't know what chipset the 1650 uses and your output appears to have given us chipset version numbers rather than card. At a guess this means that the machine is a laptop type machine rather than a desktop. I could be completely wrong about most of this. The only thing i know for certain is that you are using Ati graphics.

Ati dropped support for the 1000 series at the same time as either the 8.10 or 9.04 release of Ubuntu and relegated the drivers to their broken legacy (Proprietary) driver. Fortunately the OpenSource "fglrx" driver is improving enormously and seems to be getting better at supporting older chipsets too.

My own rant ...
Ati are a smaller company than their main rivals, nVidia, and deserve to be supported in order to keep nVidia competitive if nothing else. I tend to prefer Ati anyway. Annoyingly it appears that while nVidia have put resources into producing their idea of an OpenSource driver and apparently even paid linux developers to do some of the work! Normally it seems that hardware manufacturers pay Windows developers to develop code for linux and then wonder why they run into so many problems on the unfamiliar platform.

Windows developers building proprietary drivers completely misses out on the advantages of OpenSource. With OpenSource the code gets bug-tested on millions of machines world-wide in the wild. There are established routes that triage bugs from questions and even code patches get written by people and submitted to the main team working on the code. With OpenSource it is fairly trivial to port the driver to different families of linux and even onto Mac or other platforms. Often vast chunks of that is done by voluntary work, usually proper developers 'relaxing' at home. Even after completion, people still work on any bug-reports and improve on the initial release with updates (which also go through alpha & beta testing on a vast variety of machines world-wide).

With proprietary drivers the main team needs to develop slightly different drivers for the 6-8 main families of gnu&linux in addition to anything they might have had to make for Mac. The bug-testing is done only by the main team only and usually only on "virtual machines" rather than real-world machines. Any problems with released drivers are then dealt with by the marketing departments of the hardware manufacturers filtering out anything that can be solved by forcing the customer to just buy new. Any bug-reports that do reach the main team would then be shelved until the team is allowed to work on them and get paid for it by the manufacturer.

Often hardware manufacturers refuse to give information required to build OpenSource drivers and also refuse to build proprietary drivers (because of the work involved). It seems that most manufacturers are determined to cut themselves out of the fastest growing market in IT today. At the moment that seems sensible because linux is only 1-2% of the desktop market and most users have had to buy Windows before getting to use linux anyway. A couple of years ago that was 0.1-0.2% of the market. Linux take-up appears to be growing exponentially but even a flat rate 10% every few years should be ringing alarm bells. Some people say that once linux usage reaches 10-20% the key players will be so firmly entrenched that late-entrants trying to push their hardware into the established linux markets will be facing hostility and an uphill struggle. I need to verify this to check it's validity.

Ati apparently did release information required to build OpenSource drivers; effectively halving the amount of effort it takes to build up the OpenSource driver which seems to have translated into the same amount of effort yielding double the results. They also provided a proprietary driver. So 2 drivers where most hardware manufacturers don't even give us 1 and fairly decent drivers except for older cards.

NVidia released a proprietary driver but seemed unwilling to release information required to build an OpenSource Driver. However they apparently did resource a team to develop what they seemed to consider an OpenSource driver and included proper linux developers on the team. Apparently frustrations led to some of the linux developers walking away from that project in order to develop a properly OpenSource driver. So nVidia cards now seem to have a choice of 3 drivers; proprietary, OpenSource and a weird hybrid of partly OpenSource but partly proprietary.

In terms of hardware it seems that both these 2 market leaders have been battling for 2nd and trying hard to give their opponent any advantage. Ati made an excellent 1000 series but their 2000 series was not quite as good and the 3000 series little more than a dye-shrink of the 2000 so they withdrew support for their 1000 series to try to force people to buy the newer card (or buy from their competitors) and then released the 4000 series which was back-on-track and a superb card again, the 5000 series being another improvement so all is forgiven. NVidia seemed to create a different set of problems for themselves at around the same.

Apparently intel have always produced fairly appalling graphics despite producing excellent cpus. Bad enough that they have always been very firmly in 3rd place despite the problems Ati & nVidia made for themselves and despite most laptop manufacturers seeming to be be forced into using intel (why else would they use sub-standard intel graphics when there were 2 far better choices?). Apparently intel are finally managing to produce something that may even make them a close 3rd place or perhaps even 2nd place!

So, i have stayed with Ati and bought a 4870 card which is arguably the best in the 4000 series, well worth the £100 i am paying for it. I was seriously tempted by the nearest nVidia equivalent, despite brand-loyalty. My cpu is amd/ati so getting the ati card felt like my machine was finally getting quite streamlined.

Anyway, your output shows that you are using ati graphics which is possibly joint 1st place with linux users and an excellent choice but the particular one you have might be a little old now, possibly unsupported by the proprietary driver and possibly not yet supported by the OpenSource one.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

So if it's agreed that the problem lies on my video card being too slow for the 10.04 update, being at 64mb and there are no more doubts about what it is, I guess this thread can be closed. right?

http://computergyan.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/solving-the-busybox-black-screen-problem-in-grub2ubuntu9-10/