Installing on Dell Inspiron: won't boot

[xiar]

Hey, I've researched various distros and decided to try out Kubuntu 7.04 as I like the KDE desktop and the flexibility of Ubuntu behind it. So I got the LiveCD and burnt it to a DVD, resized my Windows partition to allow for 9 GB of extra space, and booted from the CD. I got to the welcome screen and tried regular boot, safe graphics, vga=771, noapic nolapic, gdth=disable:y, and several other tags, and

I always get the same thing. It shows the progress barl loading, it finishes, and then the screen hangs. My Wi-Fi indicator starts flashing about twice a second, and every three seconds or so it flashes rapidly for a second. I'm assuming this indicates a problem with my Wi-Fi hardware? The bluetooth light is fine.

Specs:

Dell Inspiron E1505
Intel PRO/Wireless Chipset
Core2 Duo 2.0 Ghz
1GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon x1400
Windows Vista (Other partition)
9GB Unpartitioned space

I have checked the disc for errors, checked the memory, run diagnostics, the machine and disc seem to be fine.

Any ideas?

[xiar]

Re: Installing on Dell Inspiron: won't boot

I played with it some more, and edited the default command line to take out "quiet splash" and inserted "noapic" once again, but still the same problem, except this time i could see the verbose output.

The last message before it hangs is:

Starting K display manager: kdm
* Running local bootscripts (/etc/rc.local) [OK]


And then nothing. But I tried typing, and it let me get to the bash input. I tried starting kdm but whenever I typed sudo kdm it wouldn't do anything. I tried typing kdesktop but it said "Can't determine DISPLAY. Aborting."

Anyone?

[penguin.ch]

Re: Installing on Dell Inspiron: won't boot

Oh, oh ...

# "Plan A": [sudo] /etc/init.d/kdm [re]start
# "Plan B": [sudo] dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg