Ubuntu

White Screen o' Limbo

Asked by jcwinnie

Upgraded from 10.04 to 10.10 alpha. Fine. Further sudo apt-get upgrade in following days resulted in loss of GUI and XFS filesystem. (Someone else reported a similar problem with NVIDIA drivers and I mistakenly said that the error effected me. My laptop uses ATI Radeon on board video)

So, I re-installed 10.04 with a CD. After I got Lucid back to the way I liked, I (foolishly) hoped the problem with the ATI drivers had been fixed. Nope.

I cannot see anything. I am unable to get to a command line. I do not see a moment at startup when to press Esc and go to a failsafe. Would expect to be able to do all of these things.

So, I ran off 10.04 CD and mounted the hard drive (System -> Administration-> Disk Utility). I then could edit /etc/default/grub. I thought I could uncomment a line to get a console, but sudo update-grub failed. Asked if /dev was mounted.

My question: Is my only recourse to re-install 10.04 and wait until the announcement of a stable Maverick?

These problems are on a Dell Latitude D600 laptop.
Here is a snippet from X.org.0.log.old

(II) Loader magic: 0x81f0e80
(II) Module ABI versions:
        X.Org ANSI C Emulation: 0.4
        X.Org Video Driver: 6.0
        X.Org XInput driver : 7.0
        X.Org Server Extension : 2.0
(++) using VT number 7

(--) PCI:*(0:1:0:0) 1002:4c66:1028:011d ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV250 [Mobil
ity FireGL 9000] rev 2, Mem @ 0xe8000000/134217728, 0xfcff0000/65536, I/O @ 0x00
00c000/256, BIOS @ 0x????????/131072
(WW) Open ACPI failed (/var/run/acpid.socket) (No such file or directory)

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Log a bug. Maverick is NOT ready and NOT stable. It still has a lot of work to be done upton, and even after release. If you need an OS that works then install Lucid. If you want an OS with bugs and functionality holes and want to log bugs to help the project, use maverick

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jcwinnie (jcwinnie) said : 		#2

Unsure how I would report a bug in detail when unable to use the system. I thought there might be some trick to get to a command line.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#3

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs

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jcwinnie (jcwinnie) said : 		#4

https://launchpad.net/bugs gets me to the same place. I interpreted your response to mean you knew of no way that I could get to a command line.

I have re-reinstalled 10.04 LTS and will wait for the announcement of a stable release of 10.10 and probably some time after. Curious that my problems occured after the beta release.

And, it was tantalizingly close to working. I could tell by the sounds that the login screen was there, I then could enter my password and the sound for start-up indicated that there should be a desktop and not the White Screen of Limbo.

Ah well, this has been pencil whipped enough.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#5

You could boot to root recovery console and remove:
xserver-xorg-video-ati
xserver-xorg-video-radeon

Then reboot, it will force your system to use the vesa driver.

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jcwinnie (jcwinnie) said : 		#6

I thought I did when I first posed the question, but may have failed to communicate that during start-up there is no opportunity to press Esc and go to the screen that provides the root recovery console.

BTW: This now true for the re-reinstalled 10.04 LTS. Previously a message would appear briefly right at startup to press Esc to select different image. If I did so, a list would appear and I could select a recovery mode that then booted to a screen with various choices including failsafe video and root console.

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jcwinnie (jcwinnie) said : 		#7

Answered my own question. By reading Lucid release notes (everybody always reads all the release notes, right?) I discovered that instead of expecting a screen that says “GRUB loading. please wait… Press Esc to enter the menu…” I must hold down the Shfit key.

This worked on 10.04 LTS and one might presume on 10.10, so that is how I could have gotten to a recovery console as ActionRutabaga advised.