Installer blank screen problem

[Mark Greenwood]

Well I finally got this machine to work but not without a lot of swearing…

I used the alternate installer to install the system, and rebooted. As I expected though I encountered the same problem - a corrupted splash screen and then a black screen. X was starting, I could hear the KDE startup sound, but I couldn't see it.

Next problem then was what to do next. My idea was to boot into recovery mode to have a poke around the log files. BUT how does one get GRUB to display the menu? The timeout is set to zero seconds so it seems impossible. This was when the swearing started. In the end I resorted to pulling the power cable out during boot in order to force grub to give a menu next time, and just hope to luck my hard drive still worked afterwards. I'm glad it wasn't a laptop… But this was already a bad state of affairs - the most difficult Linux installation I've had in 8 years. But things got worse.

Having managed to get into recovery mode and remembered how to remount the filesystem as writeable (mount -o rw,remount /   in case anyone needs it). I poked around the log files and sure enough, in the Xorg log I could see a bunch of stuff coming from the nouveau driver. I regret that I didn't study gibberish at university but I got the impression that the nouveau driver was confused and not sure what to do, but that it was prepared to let X start anyway in the hope that miracles might occur. They didn't. So I thought well I'll just install the nvidia driver and it'll be OK. More swearing… recovery mode doesn't bring the network up… and I couldn't figure it out (ifconfig eth0 up didn't do what I expected). For future reference if anybody knows how to do this it would be helpful.

What I did next was resort to the systems engineer's SOP - smoke a cigarette, curse loudly, and then reboot to see if it happens again. Except that my 'shutdown -r now' command mystically made X start and I could see the display! Things were now getting very strange. The Xorg log showed that this time nouveau had decided against trying anything and had allowed the VESA driver to load. So now I can install the nvidia driver! Oh no, wait, plasma just crashed. And now kded has thrown an exception and - oh look! The system has rebooted itself! How helpful.

It turned out that by selecting recovery mode and then simply selecting 'continue normal boot' I was able to get X with the VESA driver from where I was able to install the nvidia driver and now it all works. So I reckon the problem was plymouth all along, but I am not going to attempt to prove it; you'll just have to trust me.

I have 3 suggestions for the Ubuntu devs after this highly educational experience:
1) The GRUB time-out of 0 seconds is not helpful, at least give us a fighting chance of getting to the menu
2) 'Recovery mode with networking' would be a really helpful option. Even Windows XP used to have that option.
3) Plymouth is rubbish

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I didn't enjoy experiencing it.

Regards,

Mark


On 4 Nov 2011, at 18:09, Mark Greenwood wrote:

> 
> Thanks, nomodeset got me a little further - it now hangs on a text-mode splash screen.
> 
> I think I will give up on 11.10 on this machine. 
> 
> Mark
> 
> 
> On 4 Nov 2011, at 17:26, uteck wrote:
> 
>> I have a system that did that also.  At the boot promt I pass the kernel option; nomodeset
>> That fixed it for me, then you just need to make sure that gets put into your /etc/default/grub settings.
>> 
>> On Nov 4, 2011 12:02 PM, "Hakan Koseoglu" <hakan at koseoglu.org> wrote:
>> On 4 November 2011 16:39, Mark Greenwood <fatgerman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > It's an idea but if (as I suspect) this is a problem with the X server not detecting my screen correctly, then once I have installed 11.10 and I try to boot into the new installation I'll encounter the same problem, *and* I will have overwritten a working Karmic installation which will leave me with a large useless box :) I'd like to get the installer working correctly, otherwise I'll have no confidence that this computer will work for me with 11.10.
>> >
>> 
>> It is a good argument but I have experienced the same issue before
>> (pre 11.10 so my errors are not directly relevant to you). I never use
>> a live CD any more, I do all of my installations as netinstalls and if
>> that's not available, alternative CD gives me the best option. At
>> least I can drop down to a console and have a look at the logs after
>> it's failed and change things here and there and expect to have my
>> config & log files still around after an update and reboot. At least
>> one version of Kubuntu Live CD did not blacklist my Via gfx card for
>> 3D and would die horribly with the live CD
>> (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-openchrome/+bug/299631)
>> 
>> --
>> kubuntu-users mailing list
>> kubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
>> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-users
>> -- 
>> kubuntu-users mailing list
>> kubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
>> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-users
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-users/attachments/20111106/9aeedd5e/attachment.html>