Hi
Running Lucid Alpha AMD64 on a Dell 131L laptop with ATI 200M video card. Updates loaded once a day.
In the last 2 weeks+ the system breaks every other day, seemingly to do with changes to the video driver or associated changes to the kernel.
After the very first text based messages when booting the screen turns black, then I get all sorts of fine coloured vertical lines and that's about it. I can hear the rest of the booting process carrying on and see the wifi-light come up. Without gui, that still leaves me with an unusable system.
Shifting to tty with ctrl-alt-F1 etc does not help, because that gives me just another pattern of coloured bars.
First time this happened I had to wait a day and then reinstall from an alternative-daily CD.
That seemed to fix it. Fair enough, an update that hickupped.
However, since then this problem returns about every 2 days. Sometimes I can get around it by adding 'nomodeset' or 'radeon.modeset=0' to the boot line in grub. Other times it will only boot with this option removed.
Removing 'splash quiet' from the boot line makes no difference.
With the option 'nomodeset' I have also seen the screen with just the left hand half in use (right half blacked out) and 2 mouse cursors about 1/2 screen apart vertically. The left half of the screen is completely garbled but for the 2 cursors.
I have not seen any real pattern in which update to what packet seems to trigger of fix this issue. Xserver was there at one time, but also plymouth or nothing very much related to the gui or video subsystem at all (I think). Sometimes I find that the problem returns after a reboot, without any updates having been installed at all since the last boot.
Could this have to do with a race condition somewhere, making this problem intermittent and not easily reproduced?
Usually I wait for 24 hours and try to boot into rescue mode so I can update whatever has been released and *hope* for my system to get accessible again.
Of course I am quite aware that this is an alpha release, but this is getting really annoying. Also it keep driving me to use XP again (ugh!) and we don't want that, do we?
If I can do anything to give you more information about this issue, please ask.
regards
Tom
---
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: 41a9dc4bbc2c91d7f7445d204c57c74b
CheckboxSystem: d00f84de8a555815fa1c4660280da308
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
InstallationMedia: Error: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/log/installer/media-info'
MachineType: Dell Inc. Latitude 131L
Package: plymouth 0.8.0~-10ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-13-generic root=UUID=46062d1f-f00c-4276-9ff1-541279640a93 ro nomodeset quiet splash
ProcCmdline: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-13-generic root=UUID=46062d1f-f00c-4276-9ff1-541279640a93 ro nomodeset quiet splash
ProcEnviron:
LANGUAGE=en_GB.utf8
LANG=en_GB.utf8
SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcFB: 0 VGA16 VGA
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-13.18-generic
Tags: lucid
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-13-generic x86_64
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare
dmi.bios.date: 05/30/2006
dmi.bios.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.bios.version: 2.4.1
dmi.board.name: 0PM607??????
dmi.board.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.chassis.type: 8
dmi.chassis.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.chassis.version: Not Specified
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvr2.4.1:bd05/30/2006:svnDellInc.:pnLatitude131L:pvrNotSpecified:rvnDellInc.:rn0PM607??????:rvr:cvnDellInc.:ct8:cvrNotSpecified:
dmi.product.name: Latitude 131L
dmi.product.version: Not Specified
dmi.sys.vendor: Dell Inc.
see also bug 516412
After solving the problems on my wife's laptop (Dell XPS 1530 with a NVidiia, not an ATI card) I decided to try removing Plymouth from my own laptop too. Booted into recovery mode using 'nomodeset' and kicked Plymouth. System restarted fine after that.
Uninstalling Plymouth seems to have solved it for now (although I think that is not what the devs of Plymouth aimed for...).
If you want me to help you getting more information about why Plymouth borked my system(s), please let me know.
cheers
Tom