Gutsy Tribe 5, black screen on startup

[Craig A. Eddy]

After 2 or 3 startups of Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 a startup resulted in what was apparently a black screen. Moving the mouse and impacting the side of the screen showed that the cube was there and would rotate, but nothing showed on the cube.

This is on a Dell Inspiron 530N with an Nvidia GeForce 7300 LE graphics card. A second restart also resulted in a black screen with the same symptoms.

(Wild layman's guess: I am not a developer - Metacity is not being started, or is being killed in the process of startup.)

[Craig A. Eddy (tyche-deactivatedaccount)]

Secondary report:
Gutsy Tribe 5 reinstalled September 14/15, 2007. 396 updates immediately after installation. Nvidia card GeForce 7300 LE, with 512 MB memory (see above). On startup, after logging in, screen goes black with just a white cursor/arrow (movable). This computer had been rebooted 3 or 4 times after initial clean reinstallation of Gutsy Tribe 5, and had been run for about 2 days. Update to the latest kernel this morning (Sept 17, 2007, at ~8:30 AM Arizona time) resulted in another black screen episode. Rebooted and used the lower kernel number (Still Gutsy) also resulted in black screen after logging in.

Further investigation of the bug reports (change in searched for words) resulted in the possibility that this may be linked to bugs already reported due to compiz and the NVidia card.

Will try to mount that partition from Feisty and recover infromation from the logs (but don't hold much hope, since I am not that well versed in Linux or file locations)

[Nanley Chery (nanoman)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Craig A. Eddy (tyche-deactivatedaccount)]

It has been a considerable period of time (at least in terms of the distribution cycle) since I reported this bug. Since that time I have upgraded to Gutsy final, and kept up with the various updates. I have also done further research, here and in the Ubuntu Forums, and believe that this may be a conflict between the NVidia proprietary drivers and Compiz-Fusion. There have been numerous reports on the Forums concerning this, or a very similar problem, and it would appear that it always involves NVidia proprietary drivers (whether from the repositories or directly from NVidia) and Compiz-Fusion being active when the machine is shut down (and therefore when the machine is re-booted).

Background: I run a Dell Inspiron 530N that came with Ubuntu 7.04 already installed. When I decided to try the 7.10 tribes, I repartitioned to allow myself to dual boot, thus providing myself with a stable installation for normal use, and a "playground" for trying new things. Events (not linked, but coincidental to each other), caused me to loose the ability to boot either of them. One of those events was the but posted above. I ended up installing Gutsy Gibbon on both partitions, as a result of it, just after the final was released.

Because of the bug, I kept one partition set up with the generic NVidia driver. On the other partition, I installed the proprietary NVidia driver using Envy. In playing with the second partition, I determined that I could run Compiz-Fusion, however, I was careful to be sure to drop back to NO visual effects before rebooting my system. The few times I tried this Compiz-Fusion behaved as it should. There was, of course, no effect on the first partition, as the generic NVidia drivers do not support the Compiz-Fusion visual effects. I have since installed the proprietary NVidia drivers on the first partition, but have not activated Compiz-Fusion on that partition at all. Still no effect or problem on boot-up.

I have no attempted to shut down the system with Compiz-Fusion active. In fact, I am somewhat reluctant to try, for a couple of reasons. First, Visual Effects are fun to show off, but not a necessary part of my computer life-style nor that important to me. I am just as comfortable without them, and actually find them to be a distraction at times. Second, I've taken on other responsibilities with the Team of which I'm a member since the bug was reported, and am reluctant to risk loosing data again. having to do dual installs due to problems unrelated to eachother was a bit traumatic to me, particularly since I'm so new to a great deal that has happened and is happening with Ubuntu. It may be years before I am actually comfortable with doing low-level maintenance/debugging in Ubuntu. This is partly my fault, as I've only just recently had the leisure to be actively interested in trying to fathom out some of the intricacies of Linux, Gnome, and the problems that can occur.

I apologize that I cannot be of more help at the present time, but I feel my time is best served helping to advance the Ubuntu-Arizona Team LoCo. That, coupled with the fact that Compiz-Fusion just doesn't hold the interest for me that it do...

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. I noticed the version of Ubuntu your using is in End of Life status. For more on this please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases As well, the package your bugging against is updated in Maverick. Please update via http://www.ubuntu.com repost detailed error report, and update the bug status. Thanks!

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This bug report was reported by someone with a deactivated account, has no other users affected and has no subscribers. Additionally it is Incomplete so I am setting it to Invalid.