Ubuntu 9.10 Boot Problem (Reopen question)

Hi

Please could you let us know the Cpu speed and the Ram size? Is the Cpu less than 1GHz? and the ram less than 1Gb?

Also how did you install Ubuntu? Was it from a Cd or a Usb? Either way can you try booting up the machine using whichever you used but this time choose "Try Ubuntu" NOT the "Install" button at that first pop-up box? Does that get you to a working desktop?

Also i think you said you can boot into recovery mode from the grub-boot-menu? If so please can you try the option there to "Clear some space" and also see if it gives an option to "Fix the x-server" to see if it sorts your graphics card out a bit.

Please let us know how any of this goes
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Cpu Intel Pentium 4 630 3GHz 2MB L2-Cache 800MHz FSB.....Ram 1,5 Gb (Slot 1 1 Gb slot 2 512 MB)
I downloaded ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Desktop iso from your site and wrote the iso in cd with the lowest speed with nero 6 image burn...Also double checked cd for errors and was fine!I choosed installation via windows Xp with 8Gb size..
Now I choosed "Try Ubuntu" and everything works pretty fine like the first time I opened Ubuntu!From recovery mode (except from the 2 "root options" wich I haven't tried) all work fine BUT "Clear some space" doesn't do anything...I clicked on it but nothing happened!
GPU is Nvidia FX5500 and have latest drivers (recommented from ubuntu) also installed..The whole system works fine and without low speed...only that fact in the booting :/
Thanks Tom :)

@Leo. Please avoid using "Comment" button. Your question is still mark "Answered" and wil catch eyes of nobody. Please post again to reopen question.

You a absolutely right Delance!

Hi :)

It is good that the LiveCd works. That gives us access to the hard-drive and also to special tools that only the LiveCd has.

Ok, can you boot into any version, either installed or LiveCd and get to a command-line?

Applications - Accessories - Terminal

and then give us the output of

sudo fdisk -l

where "-l" is a lower-case "-L"?
It sounds as tho your machine is far enough over the min.spec. that there 'should' be no troubles and the fact of the LiveCd working confirms that. The "clear some space" usually is so fast that it's un-noticeable but repeated clickings wont improve things beyond the first time. The 2 "root" options are worth avoiding because they just drop you onto a command-line (which is another place you could run the "fdisk -l" command). You only need to run that from one place as it reads the layout of all your drives where-ever you run it from :)

Since the LiveCd does work and the installed version doesn't i would guess that the NVidia driver is causing the problem. I have not used an NVidia card yet but the Ati drivers often mess up a decent install with an Ati card. It might be the same with the NVidia. There are 2 drivers, one is OpenSource and the other is written by NVidia. Sometimes one works well but the other doesn't and sometimes it is the other way around.

Still the main thing to try first is finding out how much space you have given Ubuntu on the hard-drive as that is the most likely cause of problems at the moment.

Regards from
Tom :)

Hey Tom appreciate your help and thanks for explaining me all the above (I am feeling more comfartable with ubuntu day after day)
I tried the above command in terminal twice (first from Lice CD and second from my installed ubuntu os)
Below are the results (both gave exactly the same):
M

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40027029504 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4866 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xfa31fa31

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4865 39078081 7 HPFS/NTFS

As I mentioned before it is an 8Gb installation through Windows XP (I choosed 8GB cause my HD has small capacity)
Just to make it "clear" Ubuntu DOES work either from Live CD or the Installed one BUT in the second it waits for at least 15 seconds in that screen ("Problem Screen") for my login name and password in order to proceed to the account selection screen
I 've read about GPUdriver problems...and possibly that makes the trouble...but how do you explain the fact that with the older kernel it still does it but only for 2 seconds??
Again thanks Tom :)

Hi :)

8Gb is too small for Ubuntu really. It really needs about 15Gb to be useful. I think that might be where the problem is. Also installing Ubuntu inside Windows means it is balanced on flaky MicroSquish systems rather than robust linux ones. The main problems are the file-system being Ntfs rather than Ext3. And the boot-loader.

For my workplace i got an 8Gb usb-stick and installed Ubuntu onto that as though it was a proper hard-drive but i have to be very careful to uninstall quite a few things and avoid installing anything and i keep all my files on the work-machine's hard-drive (avoiding saving anything on the usb-stick).

It sounds as though you need a lighter-weight version so it might be better to try the 10.04 because it seems to be a tiny bit lighter than previous versions. Probably better to try Xubuntu or Lubuntu instead if you don't really need Office programs much.

If you can acquire an old hard-drive from an old 'dead' machine or even buy a new hard-drive then that would help! If you can buy a new hard-drive then 1Tb is the sweet-spot at the moment. A 1Tb drive might be £50 but a 500Gb would be only £10 less at £40, so 25% more doubles the space! A 2Tb drive might be £120, far more than double. Or you could try my route and get an external-drive/usb-stick although that can cost a lot more per Gb.

I was very careful when installing onto the usb-stick to make sure that the boot-loader got installed onto the usb-stick too so that when i am away from the machine people can boot-up the machine into Windows using the Windows-boot-loader. The bios looks for a boot-loader on Cd-drives first, then Usb-sticks, then the hard-drive so if i am away and haven't got the usb-stick plugged in then it boots from the hard-drive.

Please let us know which route you think you can take. Can you get your data out of the Wubi-install? (thats the UBuntu inside Windows)
Regards from
Tom :)

Well Tom as the situation is, I think that an external HD is the best solution for me (lower cost that usb stick + much more space)..I don't think I can "leave" Ubuntu cause I 'm studing as a pc programmer and Office is something I cannot really avoid..Regarding my pc specifications do you believe my system can run easily 10.04 (I mean usually newer OS need more powerful systems in order to take advantage of all of their functions?Moreover it's an external HD with a usb plugin,can data be transfered so fast so that the OS won't work very slow?
Ok now something else...uninstalling ubuntu through Windows XP won't "restore" my boot loader (it will still show me ubuntu option even if it is not installed any more)Plus Windows don't let you modify boot.ini (except from the time you have to select OS)
I 'll post again after installing Ubuntu on an external HD :)
Till then wish you all the best and a happy new year
Yours sincerely Leo

Hi :)

OpenSource products are very very different from the MicroSquish world. Newer releases tend to be increasingly streamlined although they tend to have more stuff in them they end up being about the same usually. The advantage is having the latest bug-patches and latest versions of software.

Also with MicroSquish products they try to be increasingly "all things to all people". OpenSource doesn't. A word-processor doesn't need to do your washing-up or play games. Instead people write specific add-ons to achieve fairly specific tasks.

As an example, say that you acquired a camera. You would install the Cheese program and then when you opened your Instant Messenger the option to use the camera would magically appear. Previously the option wouldn't even be there, not even "greyed out". The option would also appear in the word-processor, Gimp (for photo editing), fspot (for arranging photo albums) and so on. The crucial point here is that you would only install 1 program rather than having to upgrade all those programs and have duplicate code in each of the different programs.

This is one reason why OpenSource is so much less vulnerable and upgrades faster. If someone was using The Gimp and noticed a bug or vulnerability they would report it to bug-squad who would then prioritise and start working on it. Sometime later an update would solve the problem, not just for Gimp but for all the programs that use Cheese. Often the bug-report or the answer would be sent "upstream" and people using other distros, such as Mandriva, openSUSE, sliTaz would get the update. Of course these updates get alpha and beta tested and we can help by trying these out before the update gets released if we are good enough at trouble-shooting and reporting back problems.

OpenSource products, especially within a gnu&linux distro, are also very light on ram. Lets say you had all those programs open and all of them using the camera. There would only be 1 instance of Cheese open in ram. The MicroSquish route is to have the different programs all using slightly diffferent out-dated versions of the camera code and all open in each of the different programs. The programs might even have the code sitting in ram even if you were not using the camera.

I hope this helps get an overview. My knowledge about this is somewhat limited as i am not a programmer/developer
regards from
Tom :)

Hi again :)

You have a system that works, just not quite the way that you want it. I think it would be better to keep the existing system until you are able to get the better system up-and-running.

You can always have a look around and see what programs you can uninstall. I never use Evolution and it is extremely heavy. I don't need a calendar and emailing program written to copy the style of MicroSquish Outlook. If i needed a lght-weight email program i would try "Claws" if i had a lot more room then i might consider Thunderbird but my email is web-based so that i can access it from anywhere.

Do you use OpenOffice/LibreOffice for writing essays, reports and stuff or for writing code? (or both?) If you only use it for code then try opening the code with Gedit
Application - Accessories - Gedit/TextEditor
Notice on the bottom status-bar it says "Plain Text"? Click on that and choose the language most similar to the one you are writing code for. I do some website design and when i switch to the html view the css coding is also nicely colour-coded. Sadly if you copy&paste that code into a word-processor it loses the colour coding. Say i used the coding bracket <strong> if i forgot to close it with </strong> then the entire rest of the document would be in a horrible colour alerting me to a problem. If you do only use the word-processor for coding then you really don't need it and can safely uninstall it. OpenOffice is another of the largest programs but if you need it then keep it.

OpenOffice/LibreOffice make it much easier for us to communicate with people using MicroSquish Office. There is a very much lighter-weight word-processor, AbiWord, that is excellent but doesn't have this feature. Just go up to the menus and click on
Tools - Options - "Load/Save" - General
and notice near the bottom are 2 drop-down menus. With the first on "Text document" change the 2nd one to "MicroSquish Word (97/2000/Xp)" you need to roll-back 1 place. Now change the 1st drop-down to "Spreadsheet" and the 2nd to "MicroSquish Excel (97/2000/Xp)" for which you need to roll-back 2 places neatly avoiding the "Templates" option. Do the same for presentations. Now whenever you create a document people using any version of MicroSquish Office can read/write/edit your document. Of course there is still the problem of pictures embedded in the text moving around but if they are inline and formatted to "wrap text around the picture" then it is not usually too bad. Perhaps saving documents as ".pdf" or exporting them as ".pdf" ensures the layout stays the same but then other people can't edit your work easily. I use Gimp to edit pdf but then have to save as gif (or some other picture format) which confuses some people.

The main advantage of using 10.04 is that it gets considerably longer support and is a lot more stable because it is an LTS. Hmm, well not really "because of" but rather because people put a ton more effort into the LTSs. The 6monthly release (such as the 9.10) have very limited shelf-life and support drops away after 18 months. For 9.10 (2009, October) that will be this April as the 11.04 (2011, April) release gets released. This means it wont be easily possible to install any new programs after that date.

The linux world is quite unlike the MicroSquish world. Once the initial overheads are dealt with there tends to be little difference between the various releases. Sometimes it is just enough to tip the balance but its rare. Ubuntu attempts to be "all things to all people" to compete against MicroSquish and so it has a ton of programs, such as the bit-torrent-client that are much heavier than most people need. Consequentially Ubuntu is about the heaviest distro. Other distros work on a different philosophy right to the extreme Slackware family that often don't even have basic options covered so that users have to install any program they might need and gradually build up the system. Once experienced with any linux you find any other is very similar and even has the same programs available. So experienced people tend to choose the distro that suits the hardware they have and is easiest for them to configure to their needs. Since your Ubuntu is only a very near miss i would recommend the lighter brother/sister of Ubuntu called Xubuntu and then install OpenOffice (or even better, LibreOffice). However since the only problem is hard-drive space i think just keeping what you have and then doing a proper install to the external drive should deal with the issues.

Although usb data transfer rates are much slower than ide/sata the linux OSs are so much faster that you probably wont notice the difference. You do get the additional advantage of being able to carry the external drive into college and booting up to your system on their machines, unless they have locked everything down ridiculously but even then a quiet word to their lab-tech about using linux can often get them interested in having a look at the newest stable release of Ubuntu in action. I have used the same usb-stick i use at work in a number of other machines and that gives me instant access to the tools i need.

A work-around is to find out how large your ram is by
free -m
the -m gives the value in Mb, -g would give the result in Gb but with an unexpected twist in my machine. It rounded the 2012 Mb down to 1Gb rather than up to 2. I guess i have lost 36Mb over the years, as happens especially with the mistreatment i give this machine.

Once you have found the ram size then it is wise to make a Swap partition (virtual memory) = 2 x Ram or at least equal to ram. Ram uses swap to cache read/writes and so even a tiny swap on the hard-drive can improve the perceived speed of the OS.

Resizing a Windows partition is particularly dangerous and takes ages. Xp is about the safest Windows, Vista is the most flaky. 7 seems almost as good as Xp. Even a linux partition can get corrupted by resizing it but of course it is much less likely to happen. Data-loss only seems bad AFTER the event and then it can be soul-destroying so it is a good idea to back-up what you can, when you get the external drive. Then you can resize the partition and then use the external drive to install Ubuntu on.

Most hard-drives except Solid State Drives are fastest at the front of the drive and slowest at the end. The speed at the end can easily be half the speed of the start of the drive. Unfortunately it is also much more dangerous to resize a space at the beginning of the drive than at the end, for Windows. However if you have backed-up your Windows onto the external drive then it is worth going for it!

Another trick that linux offers but Windows doesn't is splitting the users settings and documents off onto a separate drive. You can have the main programs & OS on one drive and have the /home on another. It is the /home that takes up most of the space. The OS and programs takes up about 6Gb but i try to give it 8Gb to be completely safe. On your system i would aim for something like this

sda2 a 7Gb for Ubuntu's /
sda3 a 500Mb Swap
sda1 the remaining space used by the existing Windows

sdb1 a Ram x 2 Swap
sdb2 an 8Gb for a 2nd install of Ubuntu's / or some other distro for use at college
sdb3 a massive amount of space for Ubuntu's /home
sdb4 an extended partition containing
 . sdb5 a fairly large space as Ntfs so that Windows machines can read/write to it

sda is the internal hard-drive's name and sdb is the external drive's name. Windows would see sdb5 and call it something like "E: 'drive'" but would completely ignore the other partitions because it can't see them.

Note that the users settings and data are all stored inside /home and linux considers this to be inside the Operating System even though it is on a completely different physical drive.
/
is the root of the linux folder structure and
/home
is consider to be inside that. Two installs of Ubuntu can share the same /home but if one has programs the other doesn't then you just wont be able to use those programs when you boot into the 'wrong' one. The settings for OpenOffice/LibreOffice (and other programs) would be the same if the program was installed on both.

Note also that the partition numbers are given in the historical/chronological order they are created in NOT how the drive happens to be laid out.

Many people would start by making sdb3 just fairly large but give the most space to sdb5 and then keep most of their data on sdb5. Ntfs does have the advantage that almost any Operating System can read/write it and Ntfs is journalised, just like linux's Ext3 & 4. I would probably do things this way too. The /home partition only really needs about 10Gb and although i would give it a lot more i would still want my external drive to be useful on other machines. Of course installing a 2nd Ubuntu onto the same drive does give the advantage of booting up into that version almost anywhere.

To install the /home on a separate partition is easiest during the install process. Just wait until the "Partitioning Section" and then choose "Advanced/Manual." It re-scans the drivces and shows you the wa the partitions are currently laid out. you can create partitions ion there but i would sort out the partitions in advance of doing the install because GPartEd is safer and easier to use and has more finesse.

Regards from
Tom :)

HI again again :)

Ok, just to clarify and amend!

1. Keep using what currently works even tho it is not perfect. Perhaps try to uninstall certain heavy programs such as Evolution and the bit-torrent-client.

2. Set your machine's bios so that the boot order is Cd/dvd-drive 1st, then USb drive then hard-drive.

3. When you get your external drive try a test install by booting up the LiveCd and use GPartEd. Note that the default drive shown is the Windows drive sda so use the button at the top-right corner to switch to sdb. It might ask you which partition structure you want. Choose the "msdos" one so that Windows machines can handle it. Now set up partitions like this
sdb1 a Ram x 2 Swap
sdb2 an 8Gb Ext3 for a 2nd install of Ubuntu's / or some other distro for use at college
sdb3 a 10Gb Ext4 for Ubuntu's /home
sdb4 an extended partition containing just the following partition
 . sdb5 a massive space as Ntfs so that Windows machines can read/write to it. Hopefully a space larger than your current Windows drive? Is that possible?

4. Install Ubuntu but use the "Advanced/Manual" (bottom option). Edit the partitions to make
sdb2 = /
sdb3 = /home
don't worry about the rest of them. Make sure the boot-loader gets installed to sdb NOT sda. This should happen automatically because sdb is where the / is going and anyway sda doesn't have a linux partition to put the boot-loader on so you probably wont be given a bad option here.

5. Try rebooting the machine. You should find a boot-menu with lots of options for booting into Ubuntu, doing a mem test (avoid this option), or booting into Windows. If you choose Windows you might then get a 2nd boot-menu offering you a single choice of booting into Ubuntu and another single choice for Windows. The 1st boot-menu is the one that gets you into the Ubuntu that you have just installed on the external drive and this is probably the best place to back-up Windows from.

6. Back-up your internal hard-drive onto that the external drive
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/rsync
Hopefully the new external is larger than your current internal so you can back-up the entire Windows system. Grsync is a good front-end to rsync and helps keep all the permissions the same which means recovery from this type of back-up is more likely to succeed. If you don't have enough space then it means digging around in Windows to find files in strange places such as .../user/Application Data/ various things in here such as photo albums from cameras, perhaps pst files from your emailing program and other random stuff that would make more sense to have in your proper Documents folders. Backing up the entire Windows drive is the fastest way to make sure you get everything.

7. Since you have managed to install and boot into the Ubuntu on your external now would be a good time to boot into the Ubuntu inside Windows and copy documents and stuff across.

8. Unplug the external drive and see if you can still boot into Windows. If not it's not a problem. Just plug the external drive back in again and boot into Windows. In the system-tray find the green arrow that allows you to "Remove external drive" and unplug the external drive. Get to a Windows Command-line and type
fixmbr

9. Now you can boot into Windows without the external drive and since you have booted into the Ubuntu that is on the external drive now would be an ideal time to uninstall the Ubuntu that is inside Windows
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide#How%20do%20I%20uninstall%20Wubi?
See part 1 of section 4 for how to remove it from the boot-loader menu.

10. Empty your trash can and delete anything in your deleted folder in your emailer. Get rid of any large files that you know you don't really want. Defrag the hard-drive that Windows calls C: and we call sda1. Use the check disk or scan disk options in Windows. All this takes a lot of time but is worth it.

11. Boot into the LiveCd or boot into Ubuntu on the external drive. If this has become broken then just ask and we can help fix that. The Ubuntu on the external doesn't have GPartEd so you would need to install it. The LiveCd already has it but is slower.

12. Resize sda1. I might "chicken-out" and just resize off the end but the beginning would probably be better in the longer-term and this is your only chance to do this. I would still "chicken out" tho and just "put up with it" later. Windows is really flaky and even tho the system is backed-up i would not like to be forced to use the back-up. You either need just enough space to create a decent swap partition (=ram or more) or a lot more space to go with my plan to install Ubuntu properly on the internal hard-drive too. This will take ages either way but resizing from the start takes considerably longer. I would walk away from the machine and have lunch or sleep or something.

13. Using GPartEd again set up something like ...
sda2 7Gb Ext3 for Ubuntu's /
sda3 1Gb for Swap
sda1 the resized Windows

or
sda1 the resized Windows
sda2 2Gb for Swap

Some sort of combination like that! Linux tends to offer us so many choices that it is not worth writing each one separately.

14. Errr, reinstall Ubuntu to the internal if you made a 7Gb(approx) space for it. Preferably do this without the external drive plugged in so that the boot-loader doesn't get confused.

Let us know how this goes and what you think is possible for you at this early stage in your journey into Linux-land
Many regards from
Tom :)

Hi again again again! :)

Sorry for so many such long posts!

Have you uninstalled Ubuntu? Although the option is there in the boot-menu where does that option take you? Does it take you just into Windows anyway?

This guide helps with sorting the boot.ini/boot-loader problem
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide
see section 4 part 1.

If you still don't have Ubuntu working on your system then please try installing Xubuntu 10.04
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=xubuntu
inside Windows using the Wubi and then install OpenOffice/LibreOffice inside that. Xubuntu is very much lighter but still has the same functionality. They just have Gnome Office which is less usable than LibreOffice/OpenOffice.

Note that both OpenOffice and LibreOffice have a Windows version and they are both much lighter than MicroSquish Office. You might be able to do away with MicroSquish Office completely to gain some space in Windows.
http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/

Regards from
Tom :)

Hi Tom and happy new year!
Bought an external HD and installed Ubuntu 9.10!It works perfect!!!Guess it was a "space problem" maybe 8GB for Karmic is not enough!
Moreover tried 10.04 in my system (the same installation as 9.10 "through Windows XP and 8GB space") and what happened was exactly the same!
So I decided to keep the external HD with 9.10 (don't really like 10.04).
Now what I am thinking is making a multi partition HD with versions of Linux I like and need for my studies!
Ohhh and don't apoloogise for long posts,wish everyone could write and explain things like you!

Hi :)

Ubuntu does take up a lot more space than almost any other distro. Try almost anything that is NOT derived from Ubuntu and it should fit easily but Ubuntu, Mint and the rest of the family would struggle.

After installing Ubuntu there are a number of things to do.
First is to work through the Medibuntu page
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
and install flash-player, vlc and mplayer to sort out all your multimedia.
sudo apt-get install vlc mplayer
errr, i don't know how to get the flash-player this way, i use Synaptic Package Manager to search for stuff
System - Administration - "Synaptic Package Manager"
and while i am there i install "gimp" for photo editing (or for poster editing in my case).

Then for 10.04 i usually switch the buttons that are at the top of windows from the right-hand-side (Mac side) to the left (like Windows). This single line on the command-line does the trick
gconftool-2 --set "/apps/metacity/general/button_layout" --type string "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

Finally i like to get Windows to the top of the boot-menu with these 3 lines

cd /etc/grub.d
sudo mv 30_os-prober 08_os-prober
sudo update-grub

So it is a few things to sort out but other people make a real mess out of trying to sort them when really it is quite simple. The main thing is working through the Medibuntu page.
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Hi again :)

Thanks :) Yeh, Ubuntu 10.04 suddenly went all dark and Mac-like so i sort the theming by

System - Preferences - Appearance

and switch to Human Clearlooks. Then it's just the buttons at the tops of windows using

gconftool-2 --set "/apps/metacity/general/button_layout" --type string "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

Ubuntu struggles in less than 15Gb but 15 or over makes it a really nice system. It is a very heavily tweaked gnu&linux so you might want to install a distro from the Slackware as an additional dual/multi-boot. If you are exploring different distros then i would recommend trying Mandriva for it's beauty
http://distrowatch.com

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)