Please help I've broken it!

[watsongm]

Hi,

I'm new to Kubuntu so please be easy on me

I was installing everything on my machine last night and for some reason when I reboot it now gets stuck on the kubuntu screen after all the loading items flash past.

The only things I did was install samba, run kiosktool to try to sort my kmenu out and change the root password. I suspect it is something to do with the latter, but please can someone help me as I have to get everything finished tonight and I don't know what to do.

I can boot to 'safe mode' from GRUB and I get left at the command prompt, but with my limited knowledge of Linux I can't do much from there.

Please help!

Many thanks
Graham

[proteus71]

Re: Please help I've broken it!

Try this:
http://www.starrhorse.com/kubuntu-hacks/#boot

and let us know if it works.

[Josh]

Re: Please help I've broken it!

Did you download the xserver-xorg-core update yesterday? If you did, it had a bug that causes kubuntu to lock @ the screen that says kubuntu in blue with the loading bar under it. If this sounds like your problem, reboot into recovery mode and install...

apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10

then  reboot. If your desktop loads like it should, then X was the problem. There will be an update icon on your taskbar. If the update of xserver-xorg-core is version 0ubuntu10.4, it is safe to download. If it is an earlier version, wait till 10.4 is available.

Josh

[watsongm]

Re: Please help I've broken it!



Thanks so much, it was the xserver-xorg-core thing. I mush have clicked upgrade as well when I installed samba!

It's good to know that these things are recoverable. In the past I always thought of Linux as something which was always in a precarious position and could go down the second I touch something wrong, but apart from this one hiccup Kubuntu is so far very impressive!

Question: Is there anywhere I should be looking in order to get early warning of these sorts of things?

Thanks so much for your help!
Graham

[Josh]

Re: Please help I've broken it!

Actually, this forum is a good place to look for info on updates, upgrades, etc, just make sure you check the anouncement area. Launchpad (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu) is also a good place to keep an eye on.

That beeing said, this is the first time since I started using Kubuntu that their was a bug in a major component.

If you want to be absolutaly safe, you could always ignore non security updates for a few days to see if anyone is complaining about bugs in them. In my opinion though, things like this are so few and far between and easily fixed, theres rarely a reason not to update.

The possible exeption to this is certian updates causing problems with certian hardware configurations, but this is also rare on a single user level.

Josh