Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

[reidun]

I've been unable to get any versions of Kubuntu after Hardy to work on my machine. I just downloaded the new Lucid LiveCD and it won't work. Just goes to a totally black screen after I choose "Try Kubuntu without installing". I have tried upgrading to Jaunty and Karmic, and neither one of those would work either. I even downloaded the Ubuntu Lucid livecd, and it just stays on the Ubuntu loading screen forever. I am seriously considering leaving K/Ubuntu and even went so far as to partition my hard drive and install Mepis 8.5 which is working fine, but doesn't seem to have the support that K/Ubuntu does.

I love Hardy since it does everything I need except work with my webcam in Skype. Is there any problem with just staying with Hardy indefinitely, or should I be shopping around? Or is there a way to figure out what the trouble with this particular machine is?

[Snowhog]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

No way to answer your concerns without knowing about the PC you have.

[reidun]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

My computer is a Compaq Presario SR1224NX, with an Intel Pentium 4 processor, Intel 82801DB-ICH4 Sound card, Intel 82845G/GL Brookdale-G Video card, 512 MB ram.

I guess my main question is:

Are there any drawbacks to sticking with Hardy for a while longer? It does everything I need except work with my webcam, and that could probably be solved with some tinkering.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

Just curious -- burn of a LiveCD of PCLinuxOS 2010 (match the iso to your architecture) and see if it will run from your CDROM.
(It features KDE 4.4.2, too)

[madman_page]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

If you want to stick with Hardy, you might want to take a look at gNewSense, a meticulously all free-software distro (I have read somewhere that it is the only distro that RMS uses) that is forked directly from Hardy and seems to be in no hurry to move forward. gNewSense runs with Gnome by default. You can apt-get KDE 3.5.9 or last time I checked KDE4.1.

http://www.gnewsense.org/

You may not want to go all-free, but just between you, me and the internet, you can run firefox with a flash plugin pretty easy in gNewSense, by downloading the tarball from firefox.com, unpacking to from your home directory and launching it with a text command.

sh ~/firefox/firefox

To get flashplayer
Download the flashplayer tarball from adobe, unpack and move/copy the contents to ~/firefox/plugins

As fas as I know, this method works for every Linux distro.

And the media players seem to download all the usual codecs.

I was unhappy with Karmic, and all set to go with gNewSense if Lucid didn't look promising, but for me, it rocks.

[madman_page]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

I've been unable to get any versions of Kubuntu after Hardy to work on my machine. I just downloaded the new Lucid LiveCD and it won't work. Just goes to a totally black screen after I choose "Try Kubuntu without installing". I have tried upgrading to Jaunty and Karmic, and neither one of those would work either. I even downloaded the Ubuntu Lucid livecd, and it just stays on the Ubuntu loading screen forever. I am seriously considering leaving K/Ubuntu and even went so far as to partition my hard drive and install Mepis 8.5 which is working fine, but doesn't seem to have the support that K/Ubuntu does.

I love Hardy since it does everything I need except work with my webcam in Skype. Is there any problem with just staying with Hardy indefinitely, or should I be shopping around? Or is there a way to figure out what the trouble with this particular machine is?

Wow! I just took another look at this, and I could have written this post myself. I have a pentium 4 Dell optilex Gx260. I had similar problems with Jaunty and Karmic, and the same exact problem with the lucid live CD!

If you can back up your data or maybe find a spare harddrive, and if you're feeling adventurous, I'd urge you to try a harddrive install from the alternate CD. That's what I did. I have three hard drives that I can change pretty easy, so I really had nothing to lose. What I got just blew me away. The most stable KDE experience I've had since 3.5.10. Different activities in different desktops, which increased my desktop real estate exponentially. If you want to do exactly what worked so well for me, use the Ubuntu CD, and then install the Kubuntu desktop. I don't know why i did it that way, probably because the Kubuntu live CD hadn't worked.

There have been reports of some wifi issues, so I'm only urging you to try this if, like me, you have a wired connection.

[reidun]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

Thanks for the tip. I'm going to try the alternate CD. I really hate to leave Kubuntu, so I'm willing to try anything. I have my home folder backed up, and made a small partition to test Mepis with, that I don't mind using for testing. I just don't want to lose my Hardy until I know for sure that something else is going to do everything I need it to.

I'm also going to check out that gNewSense, in case Lucid still won't work.

Thanks!

[dibl]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

Much as I like KDE 4, it really is a lot of work for older hardware to run (yes, I know about the official specs ...). I would recommend Xubuntu for those old P4s with 512MB of memory. Also you can tweak it for slightly better performance with this:

http://rudd-o.com/en/linux-and-free-...ow-to-fix-that

[Snowhog]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

There is going to be, a Kubuntu remix for Lucid, using KDE 3.5.11 that should be out in a week or so. There already is such a remix for Karmic.

[reidun]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

Going back to Grey Geek's suggestion, I tried the PCLinuxOS 2010 LiveCD. It got as far as the password screen, where you can choose to login as guest or root. I assumed the passwords were guest and root, because it would say login failed for anything else I tried. After entering the password, it just went back to the splash screen, and then back to the login screen. So no, PCLinuxOS doesn't work either.

I'm liking the sound of Lucid with KDE 3.5. Is that a viable alternative for my P4 with 512 MB ram?

Basically, each distro has had a little worse problem when I tried using them. I've been running Hardy on this machine for over a year now, and it's been great. I decided to upgrade, and here's what happened with each one:

Jaunty installed fine and I was able to use it for a bit, but the first time I rebooted it hung on the spash screen and never rebooted again.

Karmic didn't even get to the splash screen, it just did some flashing or something, can't quite remember now.

And now the LiveCD for Lucid won't even work.

So does that indicate that maybe I should stick with KDE3?

The reason I wanted to upgrade in the first place is that my webcam wouldn't work in Hardy, and in all the later versions it was supposed to pretty much just work out of the box. Would staying with KDE 3.5 mean it still wouldn't work in Lucid?

[dibl]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

KDE 3.5 will definitely run faster than KDE 4, on that generation of hardware.

HOWEVER, the KDE XX is irrelevant to booting. If the CD won't boot correctly, it's not even getting to the point where it would run the X desktop environment. So there's something else.

Assuming you have valid CDs (checked md5sum, burned slow, etc. etc.), and in the spirit of "find something that works", here are two Live CD distributions that are particularly good with hardware detection:

sidux: http://www.sidux.com/index.php

Elive: http://www.elivecd.org/ (but this one pushes for a donation - maybe you can download the "development" version and avoid the arm)

It would be interesting to confirm that your old optical drive isn't part of the problem.

[reidun]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

KDE4 isn't the prob, I just remembered that Mepis 8.5 has 4.3.4 and it works fine on my machine. I installed it on another partition.

[madman_page]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

KDE4 isn't the prob, I just remembered that Mepis 8.5 has 4.3.4 and it works fine on my machine. I installed it on another partition.

Again, this mirrors my experience. Mepis 8.5, which is based on Lenny, works fine for me. The problems I was having with Jaunty and espcially Karmic, I was having with all recent releases, including Sidux, opensuse, and even Slackware 13.0. What I'd usually get was a lot of freezing up. When I first started trying the 2nd beta for lucid, I would get crashes, but a completely different sort of crash. X would just cut out, and I'd get an error message that would disappear so fast I wouldn't be able to read it. Over the next two releases, those dwindled down to practically nothing. If you try the alternate install for lucid, I'll be fascinated to see what your results are.

PCLinux OS booted for me, but it was the enlightenment version, not the KDE version.

[reidun]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

I'm just a little nervous about the textual installation from the alternate CD. I don't want to wipe out my Hardy partition just in case Lucid still doesn't work for me. Am I going to need to know commands I wouldn't have to with the GUI to be able to repartition from the alternate CD? I got my webcam working in Mepis, so I'd like to keep that. Can I have 3 partitions on one 80 Gig hard drive?

Thanks!

[jonthomas]

Re: Can't get any Ubuntu versions to work after Hardy

I am in much the same situation with my desktop computer, it also has intel 82845gl graphics. Combined with only 384Mb ram, I had pretty much given up on getting Kubuntu to work properly, and have been focusing on Xubuntu (Kubuntu is my first preference).

As far as I have been able to find out, the problem usually lies with the Xserver-xorg-video-intel package (often crashing, as is my experience). There are bug reports filed all the way back to Hardy, but they seem to be increasingly low priority. Many posters I have read seem to have given up hope of this being fixed.

Personally, I installed Xubuntu Hardy recently, but did not allow it to update the Xserver-xorg-video-intel package. All seemed well for a couple of days until I installed Flash and updated Xserver-xorg-video-intel to the latest version offered by Synaptic (software manager). My machine then spontaneously rebooted within 1/2 hour whilst watching a streamed Flash video in Firefox (every time I have problems Xserver crashes first).

I did find this post on the subject which may be of interest, it is the most "upbeat" I have found (applies to Ubuntu 9.10, not to Ubuntu 10.04):

http://janvandevoort.wordpress.com/2...brookdale-gge/

I would be very interested to hear how you are getting on with this problem, especially if you have found a distro which works well.