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Ubuntu CE 2.0 Blank screen when installing
Good evening, everyone. Here is my predicament: I just received my Ubuntu CE 2.0 which is based on the latest release of Ubuntu. After I click the install, it shows the orange logo with the slider moving to and fro, and after quite a rather long time, a blue screen. Well, it's actually blue and white pinstripes, and nothing else. And, it doesn't matter what I select from the main menu. All choices produce this same blank page.
So my inquiries for this evening are, why is this occuring, and what must I do to resolve this rather frustrating occurence? |
Hi, you might want to try a text-mode install. Here is a link with some good directions. Good luck... hope this helps...
http://users.piuha.net/martti/comp/ubuntu/install.html David P.S. While googling your problem I ran across a few threads which say sometimes this problem could be caused my not having enough ram to run the graphical installer. There is a script for ubuntu ce to convert a regular ubuntu install into a ce version. You might want to install ubuntu with the alternate cd (text mode) then use the script to convert to ce, no pun intended. :) Here is a thread that provides a little more info... http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/.../t-310293.html Best of luck.... David |
The plot thickens: no startup screen at all with new puter
Thank you, David. I will give that a try, if I can get the main screen again. Here's what happened:
I just purchased a new puter, fat ram, fat hard drive, dvd burner...good. Everything ought to be okay toolwise. THe last puter had a motherboard some eight years old. The new puter is the dell e521. It has windows preinstalled-Linux wasn't an option. I already can't bear how unbelievably slow everything is compared to my old puter, but now when I put in the ubuntu CD and reboot, I don't get the install page at all. I have to hunt for the right drive, then I click on the ubuntu, and I get a bunch of files. I hope I wasn't better off with my old puter after I just plunked down a grand for this setup. :cry: So what is this new thing about? I've never had any problems with CD insertion before. You pop it in, you get the GUI, and voila! :Pengy: My ubuntu penguin fears global warming with the lack of success I'm having with this cd so far. But I know there has to be a solution. :study: Zsuzsi |
I'm having a little trouble figuring out exactly what is going on, or what you mean exactly. I think you mean you are booting into the default windows XP or whatever came installed right ? And not the Ubuntu install program you expected ? I'll move on assuming that is what you mean, if it's not please correct me.
I think the problem is that your new motherboard bios isn't set up to boot from the cd-rom drive. So you are booting from the first hard drive, into windows. When the computer boots up look for a way to enter the bios. You will have to press a button while the computer is booting up, on my computer it's the delete button, but I've seen F8 or F10. It will usually be displayed during the boot up process, sometimes it calls itself "Setup" or something like it. Once into the bios you will have to poke around until you find something about boot order or boot priority, it's different on different bios's. It'll be all text, no graphics, and no mouse support, so you'll have to use the keyboard arrows and the tab key to move around, and some other key to change the values. It'll say along the bottom of the screen usually. I've seen the "page up" and "page down" buttons used on some, and the + or - buttons used on others. So you'll have to figure out where and how exactly to change the order different devices boot. It's not hard to do. Once you have it figured out you'll be able to change it any way you want to and it'll all seem easy, but at first it's a little confusing. Being all text doesn't help, but it really is easy, and you shouldn't have to do it again. You'll have to remember to save your changes, usually it's the F10 key to save and exit, but not on all of them, it'll say right on the screen. When you reboot you should boot into the graphical Ubuntu program you expect. Linux is great on older hardware, but it's downright sweet on new hardware. If you really want some eye candy goodies, think about trying fedora with beryl. It works like a charm with almost no tweaking, and it really is breathtaking what those guys have done. Best part is that it works on even hardware that is a few years old, and completely kicks aero's ass. It does work on Ubuntu also, but I've had problems with it crashing on Ubuntu, but it's a rock star on fedora. Let me know if that helps. If you can't find a way into the bios just let us know the exact model of your new pc and we can probably look it up for you. Best of luck.... David P.S. It's not really relevent, but I found this posted in a comment on osnews, and thought it was a good display of some of the things beryl can do. http://youtube.com/watch?v=dJO6CLln-B0 I just found this too, about a problem with the bios on your model dell.... " Dell E521, Linux, Freezing USB Mouse Problem Resolved I hit a snag this past week while testing a few beta releases with the latest kernels. I bought an AMD X2 3800 Dell E521 with a Gig of RAM for US $409 and free shipping during a dealnews.com dealfest...I feel I got a good deal. So I’ve been waiting to put my favorite distro, PCLinuxOS on it...waiting for the release of .94 due out sometime this month. In the meantime, Windows XP has been on that computer and I’ve been dual booting distros I’d like to try. The snag I hit came when booting into just about any 2.6.X environment in Linux...the mouse would be fine one minute, and then a few minutes into things the mouse would freeze. This is a USB Logitech mouse...and I found it odd that it would freeze up but the printer (HP PSC 1210v) would work just fine. After a bit of research when pointed in the right direction of the kernel developer for PCLinuxOS, I came to realize that I wasn’t alone. Many on Ubuntu’s forums and also Linuxquestions, and Linuxforums had reported the same problems...most without any resolution. The good news is that I found a resolution to my problems -D Update the BIOS! I did a major forehead smack when it was the last thing I thought of when it should have been the first. After updating the BIOS to the latest and greatest version from dell.com, I was back in business with no freezes of my USB Mouse. Hopefully, if you also run a Dell E521, you won’t bash your head repeatedly against the wall like I did." It's posted here.... http://swik.net/PCLinuxOS and more problems here.... http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...ell+usb+freeze Hope things work out for you..... let us know if we can help... David |
The Beryl is completely awesome. A must have.
If I use Fedora, will that take care of the problem with the frozen mouse? Or do I need the hub with any Linux? I saw something in there about compiling a kernel, but I don't know what a kernel is yet. Zsuzsi |
To be honest I don't know. Your machine probably already has the latest bios on it, if you bought it recently. I wouldn't worry about it unless it happens, and even then you could just update your bios. You will need to get your machine to boot the cd-rom drive first regardless to install linux anyway, so that's job number one. You can run beryl on Ubuntu too, I've just had problems with it crashing on Kubuntu, when it ran like a champ on fedora. (check out the rain effect, it's just plain cool.) Fedora has a few draw backs too. Yum-ex is dog slow sometimes, and I haven't figured out why yet, it's been slower than apt or adept on every box I've run both debian and fedora on. It still works fine, but waiting drives me crazy, and I should be able to tweak it to run faster, but I haven't figured out how yet. So other programs that worked just fine on kubuntu I am having trouble with on fedora. I can't get dvd-slideshow to work right under fedora, and I've tried 3 different versions now. So I ended up installing kubuntu in vmware under fedora just to run this one program. Anyway, they both have their pluses and minuses. Your mileage may vary, as they say. If you do want to run beryl you have to make sure your hardware can do it. It probably can. Even my laptop can. So if you have a decent machine you shouldn't have any problems. You do need 3D capable hardware. A good video card is needed. I'm not sure intergrated video will work, I'm not sure what your dell came with. If it is intergrated video, and you spent $1000 on it, it would be worth it to spend another $50 and get a reasonable 3D video card. If you do end up splurging on a card, think about getting an nvidia based card. They have very good driver support. It's not a GPL driver, but they put forth special effort to put out a working linux driver, so I vote with my wallet and buy their stuff.
Ok, anyway, fedora is a great distro, fedora and Kubuntu are my current favorites, and both have good hardware support, (ubuntu is a little better I think, but not by much), and both are very newbie friendly. I give fedora the edge if you want to run beryl, at least in my experience. Just a few terms defined for you. Bios stands for basic input/output system. It wakes up your hardware, gets it out of bed and ready for school. The kernel is a chunk of software that talk directly to the hardware, any other programs that want to work with the hardware, or work at all I guess, have to "talk" to the kernel to do much of anything. Updating your kernel used to be really hard, just for ubber geeks. The ubber geeks have made some tools for the rest of us now though, so it's not so hard. Updating your bios isn't hard either, but it can be dangerous. If the process is interupted at the wrong time it can brick your whole machine. You want to be careful and go step by step if you have to update your bios. Your bios doesn't live on your hard drive. It's on a chip hard wired onto your motherboard. And if it gets borked you can't even turn on your computer to fix it. It would be a paperweight from then on. They say you should update your bios, but I don't unless I have to. Anyway, first job, decide on a first distro to try, or partition your machine with 2, 5-10 gig ext3 partitions and a big 100gig+ /home partiton and try them both. :) Then figure out if your hardware can handle 3D, to try beryl. I have a few great fedora links, if you go that way. Installs google-earth for linux too, and a bunch of other goodies. Job number one is to configure your bios to boot from the cd-rom drive first, then your hard drive. Let me know which you decided on, and I'll dig up those links for you. Have fun. David P.S. If you do choose fedora let me know, there is a bug that installs a i586 kernel off the bat instead of the i686, and it's easier to avoid at the start rather than fix later. P.P.S. Found another beryl video on youtube, has a bit of rain near the end.... http://youtube.com/watch?v=2eDI4-IH5...elated&search= |
Wow! It's done! I got the bios changed! I didn't fix it quite right the first time though and erased the operating system. :eek: But I now have the Ubuntu working! I also want the Fedora-I'm more familiar with Fedora system anyhow and the scroll on the ubuntu makes the whole page wavy and it's slow. But I do like the goodies that come with it, though, and it's neat to try new distros.
Thanks to your excellent help, I will now have a very cool dual boot! Thanks! I did check out those rain drops on beryl. Is that incredible or what. How on earth do they do that?! One video showed the edge of the window drawing designs in the water. I like the fire, too. And the cube changing the windows. With the kind of hours I work behind the puter, I'd like to really enjoy it and cool effects are definitely welcome, anytime. Next the video card. This thing is going to be so souped up when I'm done! :) When I did the ubuntu install, there were two choices: erase the entire hard drive with the new install or partition manually. The fedora gives you the choice of upgrading, erasing only other linux partitions...I didn't have that with the ubuntu and I didn't know how to create a partition, so I went with tabula rasa and wiped everything out. Just as well-I'm not used to windows, which is what came with the puter. But how does one create a partition? Now that I think about it, partitioning will probably be necessary because my new accounting software doesn't run on linux. The company that makes the software doesn't carry a product that does, at least to my knowledge. So maybe I'll have to put the windows back on along with my new Linuxes, or else find another accounting solution. Either way, this is turning out to be a very nice, fun, up-to-date piece of equipment to do my work on. Thank you for your insights and help. |
Ubuntu was looking a little slow because of the default video drivers. They are a little slow. If you use the proprietary drivers it speeds up the feel of your desktop quite a bit, and if you are going to use beryl, the proprietary drivers are almost a must have. Linux does have quite a bit of free financial software, some of it is really good. GNUcash has a good reputation, as does SQL-ledger. I can't really recommend one, my accounting needs are minimal, so I just use a spreadsheet.
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/269/ http://linuxfinances.info/info/financefreesoft.html If you have some windows accounting software you MUST use, you can see if you can run it with a linux program called wine. You can check here to see if anyone has that particular program running yet. I use wine with a few dvd-decrypters and some online poker clients. http://www.winehq.com/ If you are going to dual boot with windows (not a bad option at all, just in case.) you would want to have windows installed first, then install linux, because if you install windows after linux, the windows boot loader will make it so you can't even boot your linux partitions. They don't play nice, and they do it on purpose. So, if you are going to have windows around, and you already paid for it, so you might as well. It's useful to have around anyway, if for nothing else than to help you figure out if a problem is a software problem or a hardware problem. Anyway, if you do have windows, put it on first, or you'll have to do some kung-fu to get your linux stuff back. And there is nothing wrong with having both fedora and Ubuntu. Just choose custom partitioning, and make 2 partitions of about 5-10 gigs each, I use 10, but 5 would be fine too. Make those Ext3. Mount one of them as / (that's linux code for root, the main directory, not the main user account.) Make a swap partition equal in size or twice the size of your current amount of ram. Then all the left over space, hopefully 100+ gigs, make Ext3 and mount it as /home. Works well for me. Then if you reinstall linux, or go with another distro, you won't lose your personal files in /home. If you mess with linux enough, it'll come in handy. Here is that fedora link I mentionioned a while back.... http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...ion_notes.html It's for fedora 5, but almost all that stuff works great for 6. Good luck....and have fun..... David Speaking of fun, check out google earth. It looks great in linux, if you have the right video drivers cooking. http://beans.seartipy.com/2006/06/15...-for-gnulinux/ |
The wine sounds like a great option. That way maybe I can use the Peachtree I bought (I'm just starting a little business :study: ) and maybe I can finally try out the Bridge Baron software I inherited with the old puter I'm replacing. The bridge baron runs on windows, which was replaced with the linux after I received the machine.
But maybe those linux solutions would be better than the peachtree. I know a lot of businesses are using linux. Yes, I'm looking forward to checking out that link you suggested. And I'll do something about the driver. The effect I'm having with the scroll is somewhat like the days before televisions had remotes and you had to go up to the television and turn a knob to get a channel. (I'm so old!) And the picture on the screen would continually run up, up, up...with a big line across the screen. That's what my screen does when I scroll, but it runs in the direction that I'm scrolling. Let's see what I can do with this dual or maybe even triple boot. Now that would be very cool! The best of all worlds in one little puter. :cool: Zsuzsi |
Hi, I am assuming you are using firefox to browse the web ? You want to enable smooth scrolling.
"As for your problem with the jumpy scrolling, this can be easily fixed: -Open the preferences window -Click on the "Advanced" tab -Under "General" in the advanced settings, select "Use Smooth Scrolling" That should help... You might want to install those video drivers I spoke of earlier too.... when you get around to it. David P.S. In the browser you are using the smooth scrolling setting might be in a different place. In mine it's under Edit(top left drop down menu, next to file) then preferences, then advanced then general. Good luck... David |
Well, we have some progress here. I am downloading the iso images as we speak.
I checked, and it says I do have integratred graphics. As for a card, though, the only thing I saw was an integrated NIC card. Is that it? I'm still unsure about the proprietary drivers. I'm not sure what they are or where I get them. Are these something that are already on the computer? Is it something I buy for the motherboard? Zsuzsi Have an idea. I bought a usb fob yesterday. Can I put my extra operating systems on there? |
A nic is a network card, not graphics. If it's intergrated, it's not a card. :) And as for where you get the drivers, depends on which operating system you use. For Ubuntu you just add an apt source, for fedora, a yum repo, then let the system do it for you. Which have you decided on ? And you can tell about the graphics by where you hook up your monitor. If it hooks up directly to a vga port on the motherboard, then it's intergrated. If it connects to a port that sticks out sideways a bit, then it's a agp or pci-express card. (plugs into the motherboard 90 degrees different from the motherboard.) You can put an entire operating system on a usb flash keychain drive. It should be a distro designed for exactly that, as you don't want the distro writing out swap a few thousand times a day on a drive with maybe 100,000 writes max, before it dies. DSL and feather both have distro's for exactly this set up. Your computer needs to be able to boot from usb though, most new bios's support this, but some don't.
David P.S. If you let me know which distro you are going to use and what company makes your video card I'll dig up the correct links/settings to set up linux to automaticly set up your video drivers. Good luck... David |
Oh, wow. I don't know what any of that means. I've only managed the last few years (if indeed you can call it "managing") on GUI, doing "stoopid reunstalls" whenever something didn't go right. Consequently, I do the vast majority of my paid work on another computer that will never be hooked up to the internet. So, even though I've had several badly outdated linux systems over the years, I am still very much the newbie.
Now that I'm starting a business, I'm drawing the conclusion that one cannot truly expect to manage with GUI in the long term, and anyway, that isn't really what linux is about, I'm finding. It's a convenient entry point to the world of linux; after all, one cannot learn about a system that one has no access to. But maybe that's what I like about linux so much. Now I have an opportunity to learn so much about something I find most beneficial. Regarding the graphics, the reason I know I have integrated graphics is because I looked at the spec sheet dell sent. I don't know what integrated refers to in this context. I tried fixing the scroll with the smooth scroll, but it didn't help. The screen goes very slowly, wavy, and then it shoots up and I can't stop it at that point. But if I can iron that out, I thought I'd do the multi boot-both ubuntu and fedora. I very much appreciate different aspects of each. The monitor hooks straight into the motherboard, as far as I can tell; here are some of the specs because I'm not sure what exactly I'm looking for. 320-4270 1 Integrated Graphics 310-8457 1 Dell 946 Vista Printer Driver 341-3867 1 Dell 13 in 1 Media Card Reader 420-5769 1 Internet Search and Portal 420-5924 1 Icon Consolidation Application 1 Power DVD 7.0 1 Vista, PC-Restore, Dim/Insp 420-6481 1 Integrated NIC card 313-4593 1 56K PCI Data Fax Modem 313-4579 1 16X DVD+/-RW Drive 420-6464 1 Integrated Audio 313-4257 Zsuzsi |
A vga port is just that blue piece of plastic that sticks out of the back of your computer with 3 rows of 5 holes in it..that you connect to your monitor. Apt is just the lower level program Ubuntu uses to install software for you. Yum does the same thing for Fedora. A repo is just where that software is. AGP stands for Accelerated Graphics Port, and is an aging tech for an add on graphics card. PCI express is the newer methode/place to install that add on graphics card. The add on cards are almost always several/dozens of times more powerful than even the best intergrated graphics. If you do want to run beryl, it would be worth the $50-$75 to buy an nvidia based graphics card. Before you do, make sure which port you have, AGP or PCI-express. And you have to be comfortable opening your computer up to install it, or have someone do that for you. It sounds like your computer came with 512 mb of ram. Is that still the case ? If you spent a grand on this pc, you really should think about adding more ram. I have 2 gigs, which is about 2000mb. Even adding only another 512mb would make a large difference in your user experience. Large. Adding a gig of ram would run about $75 I think. Again you would need to open your computer case to install it, or have someone do it for you. It's a 1 min job, and all you need to know is the right kind of ram to buy and where to plug it in. If you can plug in a lamp, you can install ram, and a graphics card too for that matter. If you are going to run with only 512mb of ram, you might want to think about installing and using a desktop(gnome or kde are desktops) that doesn't use up as much ram. They will run faster, but usually you need to learn a different way to interact with your computer, as some of those desktops were written by geeks for geeks. xfce is a slightly faster desktop that will still feel very familiar. I like Fluxbox, and icewm. Icewm feels alot like windows, and it'll fly on 512mb of ram. It even has a windowsXP theme. You might want to try DSL, that stands for Damn Small Linux. It's a live cd distro, you don't have to install it to your hard drive, but you can if you want to, it'll be perfectly happy running straight from your cd-rom drive. You can even have run only in ram, if you want to use your cd-rom drive to burn something, and it also makes a great rescue disk if anything goes wrong, best part, it's only a 50mb download. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of fedora or ubuntu though. Anyway, hope that helps define things a bit. 512mb of ram is a little light for your machine. They shouldn't even have sold you a vista machine with that little bit of ram, vista requires at least double that. A 10 year old computer with windows95 on it goes faster, and can be picked up for $50. Dell pulls that crap to save $30 on a $1000 computer to hustle people who are new to computers. It's like paying for a corvette and opening up the hood and finding out the dealer put a fricking yugo engine in there to save $30 bucks. Anyway, $50 on ram and another $50 on a video card would be money well spent, if you've already spent so much on the rest of your corvette. You will notice the difference. Vista might even seem as fast as a 10 year old windows95 box. Maybe. You will want to reinstall windows before you install fedora/ubuntu, or it'll be a problem if you want to do it later. And just having another type of operating system comes in handy, and you've already paid for it anyway, might as well have it just in case.
Hope that helps a bit... David |
Hi, just one more quick thought, if you are working with 512mb of ram and don't want to bother to buy/install more, you might want to check out Xubuntu. I've used it the past, and it is very nice, I just prefer my own highly custumised KDE. It feels alot like Gnome too, but prettier I think. I'm not a Gnome fan though, but if you're used to Gnome you might like it, and it should be faster. There is an article on OSnews about it today. Here's a link. If you are working on light ram, think about Xubuntu.
http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=17322 Good luck... David |
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