Ubuntu install blues...

[Bogie]

Picked up a P4/1gig box for a business box... Figuring on Open Office for word processing and some spreadsheet stuff. Have Windoze XP on it already.
 
Ubuntu ran fine off the disk. So I did an install. I'm guessing it didn't like the video setup (it was set for a high resolution 16x9 screen), because now when I boot into Ubuntu off the HD partition, I get a big blank screen, with no activity, etc... (and I've run Windoze blind in the past when I screwed something up, so...).
 
I'm guessing (er... hoping...) that the thing has some sort of autoexec-type of text file somewhere I can just edit? HELP? Or how do I do an install without partitioning things, again?.
 
FWIW, the box came with a 40 gig drive for under $100, with the XP Pro... So add in a $20 monitor, a $10 mouse (new) and a $15 keyboard (also new), and things ain't bad... I partitioned it with 15 for Ubuntu and 25 for XP Pro...
 

[lee n. field]

Do you get a GRUB (boot manager) prompt?

[Bogie]

Yup. I think I've tried most of the grub options... XP works fine, but the Unix choices all get me the big tan screen of oblivious nothingness... The monitor/vid card was configured a little odd, and I didn't think to switch to 1024x768 or something before I dropped the disk in...
 

[Bogie]

BTW, I can see the partitions and directory structures on both when I boot from Ubuntu CD...
 

[Perd Hapley]

Picked up a P4/1gig box for a business box...the box came with a 40 gig drive...with the XP Pro

Sounds a lot like the machines I've been buying lately.  Might I ask which brand (if any), and where you got it?  I'm in the market for more. 

And I can hip you to a source with better, cheaper machines.  I think. 

[lee n. field]

BTW, I can see the partitions and directory structures on both when I boot from Ubuntu CD...
 

Boot the cd.  open a terminal session.  type "sudo -i".  chroot to whatever mount point your hard disks root directory is on ("/" not "/root").  run "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg".

CHROOT(8)                        User Commands                       CHROOT(8)

NAME
       chroot - run command or interactive shell with special root directory

SYNOPSIS
       chroot NEWROOT [COMMAND...]
       chroot OPTION

DESCRIPTION
       Run COMMAND with root directory set to NEWROOT.

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
              output version information and exit

       If no command is given, run ‘‘${SHELL} -i’’ (default: /bin/sh).

Hmm.  Looks like you can do it in one fell swoop.  In a terminal session "sudo chroot <root directory ("/" not "/root") of ubuntu installation> "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg"  ".

[Bogie]

I just ebayed it... Figured the stuff I wanted, and the highest price, and only bid on high-feedback auctions... I know where I can buy freakin' pallets of former corporate 'puters, and I've considered doing a few, but I don't really have the room...

[Perd Hapley]

If you're looking for any more computers comparable to what you've got there, I know a place where you can buy 'em in my neighborhood and cart 'em off yourself for about the same price you'd pay for shipping with an eBay deal. 

We've got a company leasing space in the Hell Plaza Mall.  They salvage retail fixtures and office equipment from this mall and other places, and sell it on eBay.  They have at least a couple of dozen Dell Optiplex GX240s (maybe some 260s thrown in there), both the towers and "desktop" cases.  Most of them are Pentium 4, 1.7 Gig, with 20 or 40 Gig HDDs, and 256 or 512 MB RAM.  I have a similar machine (from another source), and they're not half-bad.  I've bought a couple of older Gateways from them, and haven't had any problems so far.  They've got some IBM NetVistas and few other items as well.

One catch is, they use PC133 SDRAM, (at least the ones I've looked at) so they're not quite as cheap to upgrade as a slightly newer machine.  In fact, a 512 stick will cost you about half the price of the machine.   

Here is their website.  http://www.ridyourstuff.com/stores.asp  I don't quite understand why there are so few listings there.  Makes one wonder.  But as I said, they've done OK by me, so far. 

[tyme]

What video card does it have? You can probably tell this by running
`lspci -v | grep -A1 -i vga`

Are you using ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10?

I've seen a default install of a modern linux distro fail to load X for two general reasons: either the graphics driver is wrong, or DNS is set up wrong -- i.e. it was set up one way, then the hostname got changed and X can't resolve stuff it needs to be able to resolve.

The graphics driver will be specified in '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'.  Look for a line that says:  'Section "Device"' and right after that a (probably indented) line that starts with 'Driver'.

The resolution is probably not going to make any difference.  This isn't 2000 where you had to have the right magic modeline or things would completely break.  LCDs give the driver and X enough info that everything should just work, at least if you're using Xorg... which should be the default on all modern distributions.

[mtnbkr]

This isn't 2000 where you had to have the right magic modeline or things would completely break.

That just brought back nightmares of getting Slackware to run on a laptop in 1998.  It wasn't until Redhat 5.0 (I think, this was 2000ish) that installing Linux on a laptop became anything better than self-hate.

Chris

[Bogie]

Did a buncha reading, and I may be able to alter the command line that grub uses to boot it... I'll know a bit later...

[tyme]

You can also select the grub boot line (if the one you want isn't selected by default), then press 'e' which lets you edit the kernel command line.  add ' single' to the end (no quotes), and it will probably boot into a shell.

Wait a minute... are you saying you get nothing after trying to boot linux?  No 15+ seconds of rapidly scrolling boot messages?

[lee n. field]

No 15+ seconds of rapidly scrolling boot messages?

Ubuntu doesn't do that.  Myself, I prefer that over the graphical progress bar that tells you almost nothing.

[Bogie]

Yeah, I'd rather see the rapidly scrolling stuff too... Lets you know when you have a troublem. This is just going to (varies) either a black screen or a light tan screen.
 

[Perd Hapley]

Yeah, you definitely need to know if your computer has troublem installed. 

[tyme]

If the kernel command line in grub has "quiet" in it, remove that parameter.  Just type 'e' instead of pressing enter in the grub menu.

Still, it sort of sounds like it's booting, and X just isn't coming up.  Either that or ubuntu is stupidly using a bad framebuffer setup for text mode.

[zahc]

Ubuntu doesn't do that.  Myself, I prefer that over the graphical progress bar that tells you almost nothing.

just add -nosplash to the kernal line in grub. I always do that on my systems.

[Bogie]

Okay... massive fun.
 
The evening has passed without me shooting anyone.
 
My main business box (this one...) has something... It no longer boots (regular Windoze XP Home). Only thing _I_ did to it in the past few days was upgrade Open Office to 3.x from 2.2... Methinx that one of the folks got me something that uses a hole in Java, and both AVG and Malwarebytes missed it.
 
Good news is I can see the HD in Ubuntu (plus I have a recent data backup), and it seems to be there. And I have a 1T SATA drive sitting here that's going in the box tomorrow. Bad news is that I'm going to get to argue with Adobe about a reinstall... sigh...
 
I'm going to switch everyone to Ubuntu, and just run XP for me. Let me put it this way - I ran two boxes for three years with next to zero virus protection, and only an occasional scan to make sure that I hadn't gotten anything strange. I'm here about four months, and whammo... all the cutesie crap, etc., and it's a dead box every few weeks.
 
Fun part is that this box is passworded, but it's a 15 minute timer...