<ABANDONED> Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

[tomcloyd]

SUMMARY: The upgrade appeared to go without incident. Upon reboot, I arrive at a terminal, only. Retry yields the same result. "startx" doesn't solve problem at all.

DETAILS:
* OS says it's using grub 1.5 (this is new? hardly)
* grub menu offers as first choice: "Ubuntu 9.10, kernal 2.6.31-14 generic"
* selecting that produces a terminal login.
* logging in, and entering 'startx' yields:

...No devices detected.

Fatal server error:
no screens found

further below...

"unable to connect to X server"

yeah.

Any suggestions as to what I need to do?

-----

UPDATE: Don't have time to figure this out. I need a computer. Going to do install to formatted partition.

[linxuser]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

This is a side note as I've updated to the ubuntu version. I started a while back using the separate partition for the /home

partition. All my experiments with installing/reinstalling I've chosen the manual partitioning during install and specified the

partitions (i.e. the partitions, their filesystems, their mount points), and NOT to format the partition containing /home.

Currently my biggest partition contains /home. All programs that were previously installed need to be reinstalled but, the

settings from previous installation's so far as I've seen are adopted from my home partition. This also means it's necessary

to use the same user name. Password may need to be the same, I don't know. I've not tried it with a different password.

Did try it with a new user name and old settings though still in the old user name's directory don't get re-established under

a new user name. That led me to reinstall with same old user name, and all was well. I don't know if one could make a new

partition and copy the current /home directory there to use as mount point for a new install. That may be a way to do it.

I wish I'd have thought to try that back when I started all over with a new formatted /home partition. I don't care to try and

test the idea myself at this time. Maybe someday. Or if someone knows and/or tries the idea, please post the results. Or

post a link to previous post on that idea. Enjoy, everyone!

[andybleaden]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

Just been chatting with the chaps as Linux emporium ( very helpful!) who were having trouble with some dual boots etc and 9:10 losing superblocks which does not sound good. As it is I have managed to upgrade to 9:10 at home pretty much ok but with the usual tiny ( but so far fixble hitches)

[tomcloyd]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

I have to wonder if my desktop upgrade finished dysfunctional because I did NOT do some of the available updates before I attempted the OS upgrade. I have later encountered the statement that this is a poor idea. In any case, I just reformatted my OS partition and did a fresh 9.10 install and an now finishing all my application program installs. Everything is working fine, and I'm enjoying some new functionality.

Now if I could just all those OTHER people off the servers so I could upgrade my netbook. Arrrgh!

[GreyGeek]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

All my experiments with installing/reinstalling I've chosen the manual partitioning during install and specified the
partitions

I adopted that approach several years ago because it is, IMO, the most reliable way to install Linux. Even if I install Linux as the sole OS I avoid the "automatic" route and dictate the size of the / partition and the swap file. (I gave up breaking up the install into several partitions like /, /usr, /etc, /home, etc...., but that is just my personal preference.) For a long time I preferred to use the ReiserFS v3.0, but EXT3 eventual achieved the stability of ReiserFS, but I still hate that it forces an automatic fsck every 30 boots (or what ever). ResierFS could detect a broken file system instantaly during the boot and replay its journal to heal things. Unlike EXT3, which flushes its cache every 5 seconds (which is one reason why it is slower) EXT4 does not, unless the distro makers put in a few "sync"s before they umount the HDs and wait 5 seconds before they continue with the shutdown.

[dibl]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

Right -- I'm with GG on this. Here's my "formula":

- I use a Parted Magic Live CD (actually a bootable USB stick) and partition the hard drive that way
- I have been following a "big root partition" theory of late, make it 20GB or something like that, and leave /home in it (serious data belongs on another partition anyway)
- ext4 is working fine, since kernel 2.6.28 - fscks are way faster than ext3
- use "noatime" and "commit=60" mount options to improve performance on internal hard drive installations
- shutdown automatically triggers a "sync" so normal shutdowns include full flush to disk

[Qqmike]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

Tom, just a side issue which I've seen come up a couple times. It's not GRUB 1.5. The 1.5 refers to something else, maybe stage 1.5 from GRUB legacy or something. At the command line
sudo grub-install -v
will tell you the GRUB version
(should be 1.97 I would think, or the old 0.97).

[Snowhog]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

- I have been following a "big root partition" theory of late, make it 20GB or something like that, and leave /home in it (serious data belongs on another partition anyway)

Did I read that correctly? You have /home in your root partition, and not on a separate partition? Please say it ain't so!

[dibl]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

- I have been following a "big root partition" theory of late, make it 20GB or something like that, and leave /home in it (serious data belongs on another partition anyway)

Did I read that correctly? You have /home in your root partition, and not on a separate partition? Please say it ain't so!

No, you read it right, Snowhog.

Here's the deal, in my world. 200GB of music. 250GB of videos. 50GB of data and images. All of it important to me, and far more permanent than any OS on my computer.

So, what to do? Hard drive space is 7 cents per gigabyte -- there is no concern with space, on my main desktop system. I have 2TB of drive space, spread on 3 hard drives, which is plenty for main data and for a backup copy of everything important, as well as two OS installations.

I just make a 15 or 20GB partition for the OS, and install the whole filesystem there. Then, in the /home/dibl folder, I make symlinks to my data partitions. Looks like this:

[img width=400 height=346]http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/7382/homefolder.png[/img]

But the folders that hold the pictures, music, etc. are not in that filesystem -- they are symlinks to the other partitions where the data actually are.

With plenty of space for the root filesystem, it is easy to be cavalier about downloading the occasional ISO or video -- I don't worry about free space for such things.

That's the big system -- the netbooks require a different approach ....

[GreyGeek]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

....
- ext4 is working fine, since kernel 2.6.28 - fscks are way faster than ext3
...

Look at this bug report and search for Ubuntu, which appears several times all the way to the latest additions to the thread, which are at the bottom.

[linxuser]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

I'm posting this to agree with Snowhog, lest anyone question the reason. If your /home is on your / "root" partition on reinstall it'll be reformatted (losing any of your files and settings contained in it) The /home has to be on it's own partition in order to specify not to reformat your /home. I also have given up using more than 2 partitions for linux. Just 1 partition for / (root), and 1 for /home. Works good. Saves some time. Apps still need reinstall but will use settings you have saved on /home as long as you specify the exact-same user name during install. And any files you've saved on your /home/"user-name" directory. I do get what dibl's doing though. Symlinks to another partition is an interesting approach to safeguarding your data stores. I hadn't considered the thought that you could symlink to a /home directory on a different partition within your / (root). Interesting. -edit- Oops, I see the symlink is to data store from /home/"user-name" in dibl's description. So with the /home on a different partition route unformatted it is kinda nice that after apps are reinstalled, previous settings are adopted. Example firefox: Previous bookmarks are unchanged from previous install. Other apps seem to do the same.

[barbolani]

Re: &lt;ABANDONED&gt; Karmic upgrade boots to terminal only

For those that find having the separate /home partition a good thing. It's not that I disagree with that, and it's the way I've set things up. However, bear in mind that what is very simple with a single user is not so simple if you have more than one user set up in the machine.

So, if you make a backup of each /home/<user folder> remember to create the users in the new installation in the same order as you did in the existing one. Otherwise, the ownership of the restored files can get changed and you'll end up with all files in /home/userA owned by /home/userB.

The reason for that problem is that, depending on where you store your backup, the numeric ID of file and group owner can get lost.

The ownership issue can cause no end of problems, from KDE not being able to start to strange failures in seemingly unexpected and unrelated places. The first time it happened to me, it took a while to realize my mistake.