Hello all,

I had Ubuntu 9.04 and everything was fine on my hp dv6000 series laptop until I went to load v9.10.

I had an issue with the install launcher, the boot and tty running a repeating character sequence of....

[[26~"

This repeated over and over, until a maintence shell would start up and all is fine, unless I try to use a tty, in terminal it runs fine.


After not being able to resolve this issue, I decided to try a different linux distro, SUSE v11.2 KDE. It would boot ok and not display the repeating characters, but I could not get the bloody broadcom 43xx wireless working.

So I tried to change to fedora v11 (I think), same repeating character string, debian v5...same result. So I tried to switch back to ubuntu v9.4 where everything was working and now the computer does not recognize the boot loader at all on the cd and goes right to the hdd to boot. I grabbed a fresh copy of ubuntu 9.04 and still same thing. If I insert one of the other disc in, ubuntu 9.10, suse 11.2, etc... the system will boot with the cd media...right now I am at a loss....anyone got any ideas...?

What is this character string? I have googled to now avail.

All the best!

First, I used to have a dv6000, not a good machine for *nix. The issues with the CDs you mentioned are either because of a bad burn (I once got 3 bad burns in a row lol) or because you have to go into BIOS and set i up to boot from the optical drive first. Also, (and this is rare) there may be a problem with the RAM where it isn't completely flushed on shutdown. In this case, when you turn off the computer and immediately turn it back on, it can still have the same bootloader from the other CD in memory, and thus refuse to boot. Here's what I think you should do:

1. Burn the 9.04 version again and test it on some other computer besides your own to make sure it boots
2. Turn off the laptop, unplug it, remove the battery pack, and then hit the power button again to completely discharge circuitry
3. Wait about one minute and put the battery pack back in (and maybe plug into a wall outlet).

Now the RAM should be completely wiped, hopefully allowing you to boot from 9.04 disc.

About Ubuntu 9.10, from personal experience, its garbage. They switched to upstart and removed the Service app without supplying a proper replacement, some devices that used to work in previous versions don't work in 9.10, the log in screen is an uncustomizable pile of crap (unless you go with KDM), and some of it's defaults are questionable (menu icons mission because of gconf defaults, making many users think icon themes are incomplete). You're best bet would be to stay with 9.04 until after Lucid Lynx (10.04) comes out, and even, I don't recommend Lynx until 10.10 comes out. I used to recommend Ubuntu to linux newcomers, but it has gotten increasingly unstable over the years and I no longer use it on my own box.

The first ubuntu 9.4 disk was the original disk used when everything was happy...I will try to flush the memory when I get home. I can also test the disc on a seperate machine, but I have no doubt the burn is good.

I am still currious about this string though...seams odd it shows on the deb based systems and fedora, but not suse...weirdness!

Anyways, thanks for the advice, I will let you all know how it works out.

after resetting the memory, I can now boot into debian v5 "Lenny" without the character string repeating. I find it odd that the issue would persist as long as it did. The original insta of Ubuntu v9.10 was about 2 weeks after general release. Even though I have shut my system down I guess the error persisted...till december.