[Lubuntu] Some PC's or LTSP clients stall during boot at a blank, black screen

[John Hupp]

To give my supposition a bit more weight, I removed the discrete video 
card from a working Lubuntu 12.10 machine and installed it in the 
machine that fails both as a client and a standalone-with-Live-CD.  It 
then successfully booted the Live CD.

The card that worked was an old PCI Matrox Millennium II MGA 2164W.

The card that failed was a slightly newer AGP card with a Trident 
3DImage 9850 chip.

On 12/7/2012 11:32 AM, John Hupp wrote:
> Read on about Lubuntu 12.10 after this intro: I have been 
> troubleshooting a behavior in which many LTSP clients on my Lubuntu 
> 12.10 LTSP server fail to boot. They stall after the Lubuntu splash 
> screen at a blank, black screen.
>
> But one of the PC's that fails to boot as an LTSP client also * has 
> enough resources to boot the Lubuntu 12.10 Live CD*, so I tried that, 
> and I found that it fails to boot with the same stalled blank, black 
> screen after the Lubuntu splash screen.  I left it like that for ~ 15 
> minutes to check for an 8-minute stall (which another user reported 
> elsewhere), and it didn't budge.
>
> Since Valerio P is troubleshooting (below) what seems like the same 
> behavior with LTSP clients on Edu/Ubuntu 12.04 servers, and since I 
> show the same behavior also on a Lubuntu 12.10 Live CD, I now wonder 
> if this is a *buntu 12.04/12.10 problem related to certain chipsets or 
> video chips.  Complicating that observation somewhat, I note this 
> machine I just ran the Live CD on had run both Lubuntu and Ubuntu 
> 12.04 without such a behavior.
>
> On 12/4/2012 4:16 PM, John Hupp wrote:
>
> > Valerio Pachera on the Edubuntu list has been troubleshooting what 
> seems like the very same problem.  His thread came apart somehow but 
> you can see all the posts here: 
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-users/2012-December/thread.html
> >
> > He got his clients working *most* of the time by disabling NBD 
> compression.  (Undoubtedly performance has taken a hit.)  He refers to 
> documentation of a previous problem with NBD compression on fat 
> clients which presumably was solved, but now gives the appearance of 
> having returned.  See 
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/FatClients#Reenabling_NBD_compression.  
> However, one LTSP gurureplied that it was likely that NBD compression 
> was not the cause of the problem, but was merely allow the real cause 
> to manifest this behavior.
> >
> > I checked out the NBD compression issue nonetheless.  On my server, 
> there was no /etc/ltsp/ltsp-update-image.conf file, but I created one, 
> added the NO_COMP line, and updated the image. This did not solve the 
> problem with any clients I tested. Though our respective setups are 
> different on a number of points, detailed pretty well here: 
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-users/2012-December/007206.html
>
>
>

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