Ubuntu

Failed installation of Ubuntu 8.10

Asked by Tolmap

I am a novice but determined to switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu or other Linux distro. Ubuntu 8.10 (Kernel 2.6.27-11-generic and Gnome 2.24.1) installed beautifully on an Acer Travelmate 803LMi laptop with 500Mb RAM, 30 Gb HD space and is a treat to use. Flushed with this success I wiped Windows from an Averatec 3250 series laptop that has 550 Mb RAM and 60 Gb of HD space. From the same Ubuntu 8.10 CD used to install on the Acer, the Averatec installation was carried out and after going through all the stages it ended up for a relatively long time (2-3 minutes) on a black screen with blinking cursor in the top right hand corner. Then it came out with a text (white on black) disclaimer about Ubuntu's no responsibility for liability followed by instructions about using Sudo, Root, Password and finally provided a text command line: ubuntu@ubuntu: ~$

When installing onto the Acer laptop, it went finally into a lovely desktop graphical interface. Windows based user it was something that I could start to use.

Can I take it on from here? Do I have to learn command line language and input the next step? I tried a variety of commands selected from the installation documentation, such as typing in reboot etc but none worked. I have tried reinstalling using options provided by F6 and also looked to see whether there were any Bios problems such as antivirus protection of the MBR - all to no avail. The Averatec seems to be acceptable hardware from what I've been able to find on your support site. I tried installing OpenSUSE 11.1 and it ended up like Ubuntu 8.10 on a text command line. PCLinux OS installed into a GUI but moved as though it had grown lead boots and when rebooted after installation it was unable to boot.

The Averatec uses and Athlon XP-M but is reported in the hardware section of your support site to be OK. I would be very grateful for any advice.

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Koen (koen-beek) said : 		#1

maybe you should try to change the xorg.conf file as in following post : http://www.linuxcompatible.org/Averatec_3225HS_c12097.html

it seems there has been a compatibility problem with the averatec since Hardy (8.04)

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Tolmap (p-amlot) said : 		#2

Thanks Koen

I'm too much of a novice to think of getting into editing scripts within Linux code, so I took the hint and tried installing Ubuntu 8.04 because you'd mentioned that it was a problem occurring since then. However, exactly the same occurred with Ubuntu 8.04. So I tried Ubuntu 7.10 and that worked and it came up with a GUI, following which (with a bit of fiddling around with the formatting of my HD) it installed impeccably. On rebooting though I was faced with an error message that said 'Grubv1.15 Grub Error 18'. Looking around it seems that may occur with HD over a certain size and the Grub area at the beginning of the disk cannot be read. I tried partitioning the HD so there was an area in the first 500Mb of the disk which was unusable, but no luck.

I was hoping that by installing Ubuntu 7.10 to be able to upgrade to 8.10 without the necessity of learning Linux code at this stage or at least to do it gradually by having a system that I could play with and see the effects! Naive maybe.

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Tolmap (p-amlot) said : 		#3

Just in case anyone comes back to this question, it is to say that I've solved it with help from the Ubuntu community. The problem of the Grub Error 18, 17 and 2 that came up with successive attempts at resolving the issue were largely resolved by the advice from here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351 and switching on and off from the LBA setting within CMOS. So now I have installed Ubuntu 7.10 on the Averatec and will be looking to configure it so as to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10.

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Tolmap (p-amlot) said : 		#4

Final outcome of installing 8.10 to an Averatec 3200 series laptop is that the sequential upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 and then 8.10 went without any problem, except that it had to be done online because the Software Applications applet in Ubuntu wouldn't recognise the CD-ROM and I couldn't point it to the Ubuntu upgrade disks even though the system had mounted the CD-ROM. Wireless networking was flabbergasting until I came across the lead from Wezlo in http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-609340.html indicating that no information should be added to the Network applet but it should all be done Auto. So, with an obviously difficult piece of Hardware (namely the Avertec) Ubuntu 8.10 is up and running with a few minor repairs to be done!