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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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Originally Posted by Gregg Bell View Post
Thanks Dennis. I should've mentioned this as a potential clue. When I did the upgrade from 15.10 to 16.04LTS I got through the entire update fine. The last thing to do was to reboot. So I clicked on reboot. Well, when I did nothing happened. It wasn't like a normal reboot at all. The screen just went blank. And stayed blank. For maybe 2 or 3 minutes. After that time had elapsed I thought the computer had powered off (it had not) and so I pressed the power button,thinking I was turning it on.
I wonder if that may have had something to do with the subsequent problems.
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Possible.
I encountered something like that on an older machine.
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Hey Dennis. Thanks. Thing is this computer is only about 3 or 4 years old. It's 64 bit. It's pretty nice.
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I did a version upgrade from a version of Ubuntu to a later one. The upgrade process went normally. Things went to Hell in a bucket when I rebooted.
The problem was that the new kernel required PAE support, and the ancient notebook (a Fujitsu p2110) I was installing to didn't have it. So the new kernel didn't install.
What I got when I booted was an unusable system, and the symptoms were video related. If I booted to a command line, all was well. If I tried to use a GUI, I was hosed.
What I wound up doing was wiping the Ubuntu slice and reinstalling from scratch, carefully stopping before that version upgrade. There wasn't anything on the Ubuntu slice I needed to preserve, so it was a viable (if time consuming) alternative.
(I sent a nastygram to Ubuntu recommending that if the upgrade required stuff like PAE support, it should test for that and abort if not present as the first thing it did.)
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I hear you. The installation instructions for many things leave stuff out. Like you're supposed to be a psychic as to what's needed. So frustrating. I usually need two or three information sources to install anything.
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The Fujitsu was a pass along from a friend who upgraded, but loved the old machine, and didn't want to just throw it out. I used it as a test bed to see what performance I could wring from ancient hardware without throwing money at it. The big limitation was 256MB RAM, which the Transmeta Crusoe CPU grabbed 16MB off the top of for "code morphing". It came to me with WinXP SP2 installed and took 8 minutes to simply boot. Actually doing anything once it had took longer. No surprise. XP wants 512MB RAM minimum. I reformatted, repartitioned, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS in a multi-boot config.
I originally installed Xubuntu, which installed without a hitch but was still snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums said that too much Gnome had crept into XFCE, and that Ubuntu had a steadily advancing idea of what "low end" was. They recommended what I did: wipe and install from the 10MB Minimal CD, to get a working command line installation, then use apt-get to pick and choose what I wanted. Installing LXDE, a specifically light-weight GUI package, brought the Xorg stuff needed to use a GUI as a dependency. The result, installed on an ext4 file system, was still no speed demon but was usable. Puppy was designed for low end kit, and also worked fairly well. Win2K Pro worked a little better than Linux, after I took everything I could out of the Startup configuration. (The big win was turning off the Windows Update service, since Win2K would no longer get any. It saved me a SVCHOST.EXE process and 10MB RAM.) FreeDOS flew.
The other issue with that box was a slow IDE4 HD, and that was a BIOS limitation that swapping in a faster drive wouldn't fix. Large programs took forever to load. I didn't even try to run current Firefox, It would take 45 seconds to load and be perceptibly sluggish once up
It was fun to play with and tweak, but I had other machines where the real work got done. I haven't even turned it on in months.
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I've got two Dell Latitude 505 laptops. I just wanted to run Libreoffice on them and use them as word processors. People told me there was no way. Well, at first I installed Xubuntu on one of them and although the LO wasn't bad, everything else was molasses.
Got rid of Xubuntu and installed MX-14 and the LO works great. The other laptop I put Porteus on and that works even better. (So much for the naysayers.)
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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When I simply push the power button the computer does not boot. Period.
This is how I go about starting the computer.
1) I turn on the monitor
2) I push the power button.
3) As the DDR3 and Slave/Master stuff starts coming on I hold down the Shift key.
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Tell me more? I don't see those here, and don't recall ever seeing them.
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I can't really tell you anything else. Yeah, the information (the DDR3 etc) just shows up as if it's on the terminal. It isn't the actual terminal (I don't think anyway) but it's data on a black screen.
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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Normally I don't see a grub screen. Or at least I've never noticed it. And now, thank goodness for the grub screen because it let's me choose the 15.10 kernel as the two 16.04 kernels don't boot.
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What, if anything, happens if you try?
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Nothing happens. The computer gyrates (the red light comes on intermittently as if it's loading) for about 2-3 minutes and then the "No Input Signal" window comes on and then the monitor shuts off.
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
What do you have on the machine you need to preserve? I strongly suspect your best option is also "Wipe and redo from scratch". I think a 16.04 LTS installed from scratch might work but that's just a guess. If not, go for th previous 15.04 LTS release, and stay put.
Dennis
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I don't need to preserve much. I would be more concerned about the stuff that syncs, like Mega (cloud storage), Dropbox, the favorites in the Firefox browser and a few other things.
And the other kernel is 15.10, not 15.04 LTS.
But there's a new development. I was uncomfortable about that GRUB_DEFAULT=4, and today there was a software update that I installed. Well, as it was installing I watched the "details" in the terminal. There were a ton of things of course but also several Warnings! that anything other than "0" in the GRUB DEFAULT would not be recognized. (or something along those lines anyway).
So I went in and changed the grub default back to zero. Then (the software update called for it) I did a reboot.
The reboot started out as the same old same old. Totally not typical. No Dell screen. No Xubuntu screen. And I can't remember if there was the DDR3 and Master/Slave stuff that is usually there (I don't think it was there). So it was just the blank screen and then the "No input signal" window and then the monitor turned off.
Well, in the past when the computer booted to the 16.04LTS kernel (from the power switch) I always waited about 17 minutes before I scrolled the mouse and then the screen would be up and populated with icons (all normal). So today on this latest reboot I waited the 17 minutes and low and behold the screen was up. All normal.
I ran the
command and it was indeed running the latest 16.04LTS kernel.
I was tempted to see if I could get into the latest 16.04LTS kernel via the Grub loader (to bring it up faster) but then I thought I didn't want to mess with things. I can live with the 17 minute start time. (Otherwise, I'd have the 15.10 kernel running and then are the software updates for the 16.04LTS backward compatible and apply to the 15.10?)
This way, hopefully, when the 16.10 (short term) upgrade comes along it will take properly.