Ubuntu 10 on an IBM T60?

December 2, 2010 8:23 AM

I downloaded the pendrive version of Ubuntu 10 and it boots fine on my IBM T60 laptop. But when I actually ran the full install it doesn't want to boot up . The boot process just ends with a blank, non-responsive screen.. Any ideas?
posted by Scoops to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

[ctrl] [alt] [f1] to bring up a virtual terminal. From there you can restart X
$sudo /etc/init.d/x11-common restart

I'd also suggest plugging in an external monitor.

You may also want to check your logs. Which you can do, by booting it from pen drive, and reading the logs off the hard drive.
posted by sebastienbailard at 9:03 AM on December 2, 2010

Be more specific. There's no such thing as Ubuntu "10": you have either 10.04(Lucid Lynx), or 10.10(Maverick Meerkat). It may be important.

It's a different model so you'll have to do some of your own digging, but I had this problem when I tried to install Lucid on my old Thinkpad R50e(it was not restricted to this model or even Thinkpads). This made me stick with 9.10 Karmic for a long time because I didn't have the patience to hunt down how to fix it, if possible at the time. For your hunting, it was being "affectionately" referred to as the "black screen of death" and seemed to have something to do with the video chipset. I could be wrong on the chipset bit. And I think a BIOS update was supposed to resolve it. Hopefully that helps you either find your fix or at least ask the right people the right questions and get there.

It did not happen with Maverick, which I finally installed just the other day, but even that seems to occasionally freeze up in a similar way if I leave the machine alone for a long time even though it's never supposed to sleep; I'm still monitoring to figure out the behavior.
posted by Su at 9:17 AM on December 2, 2010

From my own wrestling with this issue on a computer with an older Radeon video card, it has to do with "kernel mode setting", and disabling it at boot will allow you to finish booting.

this google may or may not be helpful.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 9:44 AM on December 2, 2010

You can also try booting in a more verbose way. Hold down the SHIFT key when booting and that should drop you into the Grub menu. It should be set to the top entry in the list, but look at the bottom of the screen and hit 'c' (or maybe it's 'e') to edit the command line. That will put you in a window with a lot of complicated things, but you just want to arrow down to the place where it says 'quiet' and 'splash' and delete those two words. Then hit 'Ctrl-x' (again, should be listed on the bottom of the screen) to continue booting. This will turn off the splash screen and maybe let you see the bootup messages scroll by. You can also add 'text' where you deleted the other two words to avoid it trying to start gdm/x11.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:03 AM on December 2, 2010

This is a nice explanation of how to tinker with the boot options in Ubuntu: Ubuntu Boot Options

Had something similar happening to me on an old desktop with an equally old nVidia graphics card. The solution was getting into the Grub menu (in the way mentioned above) and add to the command line "-noacpi -nolapic". After successful boot into the installed Ubuntu, I grabbed the nVidia drivers and everything worked fine from there on (though those options need to stay put, AFAIK).
posted by Iosephus at 10:26 AM on December 2, 2010

Response by poster: The version I installed was 10.10.1

So is the best idea to install an earlier version or fight with 10.10.1 to get it tweaked?
posted by Scoops at 11:31 AM on December 2, 2010

Do you have a Radeon video chipset? If so, give this a try.

Boot into a terminal window and type the following.

sudo echo options radeon modeset=0 > /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf

All this does is create a file named radeon-kms.conf and put a line in it that tells Ubuntu to turn kernel modeset off. It's on by default in all versions after 9.04.

I had a Dell laptop that blackscreened on resume. This fixed it.
posted by COD at 5:09 PM on December 2, 2010

Personally I would take it as a challenge to my geekhood to make it work. :) But you might want to go back to 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) as it is the Long Term Support (LTS) version. Ubuntu keeps two tracks of development going, they release a new version every 6 months that they don't intend to support for long, then every so often they release a LTS version where they swear to support it for X amount of time to come with patches and backports and such. Lucid is the latest LTS version so you might have better luck with any problems having been fixed there. Also, Lucid uses an older kernel, so if it's something relatively new that's causing you problems you might have better luck with the older kernel.

The big questions are can you get to the GRUB boot menu (GRUB installed and works correctly). If that's possible you can most likely get to a single user text-only shell (remove 'quick', 'silent' and add 'text' or better yet 'single'). Then does it boot, then how comfortable you are with using the cli while browsing with another machine. If you can get to a shell prompt then it's likely the problem is kernel boot parameters or x11 graphics driver issues. To quick fix x11, just 'rm -f /etc/X11/xorg.conf' and try again. (that will remove any accelerated drivers and let x11 fall back to the standard vesa drivers which probably work with anything these days).
posted by zengargoyle at 5:25 PM on December 2, 2010

Response by poster: I ended up banging my head against the wall trying to get 10.10.01 going but gave up. So I downloaded the 9.10 iso and installed that. It had a few hiccups because I was impatient and started playing with it before it was finished updating.... So after another fresh install and giving the update manager a chance to run through its thing... I'm at 10.04 and its running like a champ.

Thanks so much for all your help and advice.
posted by Scoops at 11:41 AM on December 9, 2010