Ubuntu 8.10 – The Pain

I had to jump through so many hoops to get Ubuntu 8.10 working. the LTS 8.04 works perfect (more or less) but this version seems very unstable.

First I have a bad DVD drive (or bad CD) so it wasn’t 100% Ubuntu’s fault. The drive keeps spinning up and down when it reaches maximum speed during the install but watching DVDs, installing things off the DVD or even just browsing the contents works fine. There was a loud noise when it spins up to the maximum speed and sounds like the disc takes off and knocks into the side of the tray and spins back down. The drive does not have any braces to keep the disc down.

After getting over the hurdle it installed OK but had problems after logging in. The brown desktop appears and the mouse cursor changes to busy but nothing happens. Everything then locks up and I had to do a hard reset. I’ve experienced this early on when 8.10 came out and that’s why I decided to stick with the LTS version.

Now that I had a new piece of hardware which requires the new kernel version in order to get it running smoothly I had more determination to get it to work. I looked around the Internet found found a work around. People say it could be Compiz. Once the GDM appears (login screen) press Alt+Ctrl+F1 and you switch to tty1 command line terminal. Login with your username and password and proceed to remove Compiz:
sudo apt-get remove compiz compiz-core
Once it has been removed you can switch back to the X (graphical) mode Ctrl+Alt+F7

It should not lock up straight away and your desktop should load now but rather it would stay up for random amount of time from 5 minutes to hours before crashing. The odd thing is it doesn’t do a kernel panic so I think it may be something further up the OS.

The second thing I tried was to disable ACPI. This can be done as a temporary thing or as a permanent change (which is revisable).

Temporary fix: On boot up in the grub menu, select the kernel you want to boot up in and press to edit the boot string. Go to the line where it says kernel and append the following:
acpi=off acpi=force acpi=force pci=noacpi noapic nolapic
Finally press to boot into that kernel.

Permanent fix: Edit the file /boot/grub/menu.list, find the line that starts with “kernel” (it should look something like /boot/vmlinux…) and add the following to the end of the line:
acpi=off acpi=force acpi=force pci=noacpi noapic nolapic
Save, exit and restart and the changes should effect.

To remove the Ubuntu boot screen and view the terminal on start up remove the words “quiet” and “splash” from the “kernel” line.

Removing compiz and turning off ACPI did not help with my system locking up. I am now waiting for 9.04 and pray that it has fixed the issue.

Ubuntu 8.10 freezes after login screen Article

ubuntu 8.10 freezes (ACPI?), older versions work smoothly Forum Post

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About Danny

Young I.T software professional always studying and applying the knowledge gained and one way to do this is blogging. Dedicated to I.T since studying pure Information Technology since the age of 16, Danny is now in the industry that he has aimed since leaving school. View all posts by Danny → This entry was posted in Linux and tagged ACPI, compiz, grub, kernel, kernel panic, Ubuntu. Bookmark the permalink.