Odd boot issue with Ubuntu 8.10
 

I kept hearing great things about the speed of Ubuntu 8.10s start-up
and decided to install it a few weeks ago. This release seems to be
plagued with issues, and in my opinion was not ready to be released as
"stable." I have worked out most of my problems, however...

Upon start-up about 10 seconds after powering on the computer, I am
presented with a black screen with a flashing (under-score) in the top
left corner. The machine will do this indefinitely unless I hold down
'ctrl' or 'alt'. After I hold down one of these keys, I am in 'X' in
about 30 seconds.

Any ideas?

System Info:

Compaq Presario laptop
AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60
2GB DDR2 RAM
nVidia GeForce 7000M (NVIDIA Driver Version:177. 80)

I would appreciate any help.

thank you,

-Eric

Could you specify whether it happens before Grub (it's the stage where you see a list of the operating systems you can boot or a message telling you to hit 'esc' to see the menu) or after it? If it happens before, it's probably a bootloader/bios problem. If after, try booting with the nosplash kernel option: when Grub comes up, enter the menu with 'esc' key (if it's not visible right away), select your Linux operating system (if it's not selected right away), press 'e' to edit that entry, hilight the line that starts with word 'kernel', then press 'e' again to edit that line. Scroll to the end and replace the word 'splash' with 'nosplash', then press 'enter' and (if I'm right; there are instructions at the bottom of the screen) 'b' to boot. This way you should see any/all boot messages instead of the default grahpical loading bar..it might help to understand what's going on.

If you happened to install the Release Candidate or Beta version instead of the final version, you might want to try reinstalling it (using the final version). I hear a lot of people have some sort of (mostly minor, but sometimes bigger) problems with this new Ubuntu version, but I don't -- after the RC turned final, the only bugging has been in OpenOffice 3 and that's probably because there is no official Ubuntu package of it as of now and I used an alternative way of installing it.. So maybe the trouble is really either hardware related or then that people have done an upgrade instead of reinstalling, which leads to old configurations being (at least partially) preserved and whatnot.

I see similar with an old (and I mean ooolllddd) Inspiron 1100 that I installed the beta on. In my case it's an intermittent X greeter problem. I just <alt>-<ctrl>-<bksp> ; sometimes it comes back, sometimes not.
I live with it seeing as how it was such a hassle getting the thing built in the first place.

It is after GRUB that the problem takes place. I am not typically presented with the GRUB menu. The machine is dedicated to Ubuntu(no other OS) After editing the kernel line to 'nosplash' I still have to hold down 'ctrl' and get:

[kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot...]

Which will stay displayed until I hold 'ctlr' again.

It is the Final Release that was installed on a fresh HD.

I noticed that I have to hold 'ctrl' until the process passes the [setting preliminary keymap] stage, then continues the boot process normally.

have to hold ctrl ket to boot
 

I'm having the same problem booting ubuntu-8.10-desktop-amd64 from cd. I have to hold down the ctrl key or it won't finish booting. This is happening after Grub in the screen with the progress bar with the orange rectangle going back and forth. It freezes and when I got ready to press ctrl-alt-del it started going again. So I gotta put a brick on the ctrl key if I want it to boot by itself.

I'd like to know if there's a fix for this before I install it to my hard drive.

Thanks.

There does not appear to be a fix for this. I posted this question in several lists, but no one seems to have any answers. I would not install. The problem originated the same as yours (booting live cd). This is why it wasn't much surprise to me that it continued to happen after the install. I have had nothing but problems with the new release. The developers should have pushed the release date out to allow time to fix these issues. Oddly enough, the pre-releases never had this issue. The only issue I had with the pre-releases was with installing the nvidia drivers. Either way, If you're looking to use Ubuntu, I would go with 8.04.

Not sure why you'd say that, its working perfectly for me on 3 machines, no problem at all. I've also put it on several other people's machines, no problems.

Sorry you're having an issue, but that doesn't make it unstable.

IGF

This seems to be common to compaq presario laptops, I have a similar problem although I needed to hold down the enter key, I have tried both 32 and 64 bit versions + upgrading via net from 8.04.1 all with the same result.

My advice stick with 8.04 on compaq

Have a read of this thread and try the suggested resolution.

Hey redbook, Have a look at the linked post. Try passing the "hpet=disable" kernal parameter using the liveCD. It what worked for me.

Thanks for the reference syg00.

This was the one issue that was going to drive me back to 8.04 on this laptop.