Comment 42 for bug 12637

So you believe it's all kernel's fault? Can you verify it works with Ubuntu
8.04 Alpha 64 along with Kubuntu or should I pop out some CD's? Thanks
Richard!!

On Feb 13, 2008 1:38 AM, Richard Green <email address hidden> wrote:

> Here's some more info. I went to system/administration/services, and
> disabled gdm, thinking I'd reboot to a console, just to see if this was a
> kernel problem, or possibly an xorg problem, since it's happening just
> milliseconds before the screen blanks to switch to X.
> Well, that wasn't clean at all! it kills gdm immediately, which blew
> away my X session, as well as all the apps running, leaving me at a very
> ugly console with a huge font, reminiscent of my old commodore VIC-20.
> I managed to reboot, and it did come up without X, but with the same ugly
> huge font, so I only saw about 10 lines of text, and my prompt was somewhere
> below the bottom of the screen, so I was typing blind.
> ...but the important part is that the screen dimmed, so this is
> definitely NOT an X issue, it's in the kernel. I also focussed my eyes at
> the top of the screen during the boot, and I was able to see that the [PCI}
> allocation... error that was displayed there came up DIM, just before the
> screen blanks, so the actual sequence is something like this:
> 'Kernel is alive'
> 'kernel mapping tables...'
> (backlight goes to dim)
> '[PCI] allocation'...
>
> <rant>
> Once I logged in at the console, I ran startx, and was able to get my
> desktop. I again went to system/administration/services and re-enabled gdm,
> which AGAIN took immediate action, which in this case tried to start a
> second X server, which failed once, but eventually succeeded (as :1),
> leaving me at the gdm prompt. I have no idea which virtual console I was
> on, but ctrl-alt-f7 got me back to the X session. I probably should file a
> bug elswhere for this usability issue... Or just go back to school. In
> this new age of upstart, how do I cleanly do a one-time reboot to a normal
> console? On my old redhat or suse systems, I always had runlevel 3, but I
> discovered a while back that in ubuntu runlevel 3 is the same as runlevel 5,
> and now with upstart, I have no idea if 'runlevels' even exist anymore, and
> if they do, how to configure and specify them?
> System/administration/services certainly has no visible 'runlevel-like'
> distinctions, /etc/inittab is gone grrr...
> There is no 'upstart' directory under /etc. There is no upstart manpage.
> Where do I look for clues? `man init` is still there. scroll to the
> bottom, its author is Scott James Remnant. So he calls the project upstart,
> but the binary is still init, just to confuse us, right?
> OK, the manpage mentions /etc/event.d. Go browse... rc-default seems to
> fall thru to runlevel 2. Looking at the /etc/rcn.d directories, I find that
> runlevel 1 would not start X, but all others 2 - 5 do. So I can probably
> edit one of those other directories to create a multiuser without X
> runlevel, but I still don't know how to pass a one-time parm thru grub to
> select that level. More studying to do, and I'm tired. I'm going to bed
> now...
> </rant>
>
> --
> LCD Brightness on Laptop Always Set Very Low at Boot
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/12637
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug.
>