After updating to 8.10 alpha 5, system halts on boot-up until I press CTRL key (or any other key)

[l33ting disorder]

Yesterday I updated to Intrepid Ibex 8.10 alpha 5 (from Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS) and ever since there's this very peculiar quirk.

During boot up, you know how there's two phases during which you see the Ubuntu screen with the progress bar - in the first phase the progress bar just scoots back and forth, then in the second stage it turns into an actual progress bar, marching from left to right indicating how close it is to being done... Well during the first stage it just stops scooting and acts like it's hung. Nothing happens - I can leave it like that for half an hour and come back to it being in the exact same spot.

Here's where it gets weird: if I press any key (even the CTRL or SHIFT keys) the progress indicator starts scooting back and forth, but as soon as I take my finger off the keyboard it stops again and doesn't budge until I put my finger back on it to nudge it along.

It's like a stubborn child that doesn't want to go to school in the morning - just stands in one place until I nudge it along on its way.

Once it gets to the second phase where the progress indicator starts filling up from left to right, I can take my fingers off of the keyboard and it'll continue on its merry way (I guess by that point it knows it's gonna have to go to school so begrudgingly it drags its heels, heh).

I assume this is just a bug that will be fixed by the time 8.10 LTS comes out but I thought I'd bring it up in case any devs find the info useful, and (more to the point) just because it's so amusingly bizarre. ;)

To be honest I kind of enjoy having it act that way - I like to think it might befuddle some miscreant blackhat trying to log into my system while I'm in the break-room ;)

[l33ting disorder (omni-networksense)]

(bump)

[VijayakumarK (vijayakumark)]

I have this problem as well on my laptop. Here are some details

Upgraded from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 Beta over internet.
Laptop model: dv6920us

Interestingly, the problem wasn't there when I had ndiswrapper installed for wireless. I removed ndiswrapper to see if the new ath5k driver detects my Wifi.

Same behaviour with the live cd as well.

lspci output attached.

[VijayakumarK (vijayakumark)]

Thought will add additional information.
$ uname -a
Linux vijayk-laptop 2.6.27-7-generic #1 SMP Tue Oct 14 18:40:44 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu intrepid (development branch) \n \l

$
===================
Also, when resuming after hibernate, it works just fine. Only normal reboots ( without a resume image ) have this problem.

dmesg output attached.

[Lucas Hartmann (lucas-hartmann)]

Same problem here.

Kubuntu 8.10 (release, not beta)
Kernel version 2.6.27-3 and 2.6.27-3-rt.
HP dv6620ea notebook.
Using restricted drivers for nVidia v177 and Broadcom wireless.
uname -a = Linux lhartmann-laptop 2.6.27-3-rt #1 PREEMPT RT Mon Oct 27 03:02:33 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux
lspci output attached

[Shubhendu Joardar (sjoardar)]

The Intrepid Kubuntu 8.10 seems to work well on my laptop compaq-F733au (motherboard MCP67MV) except that it halts at several occations while booting. I have to press a key every time to continue the booting process. This is true even if I boot with livecd kubuntu 8.10. It seems there is a bug in the Kernel regarding acpi. Once I disabled the acpi (menu.list acpi=off), the boot process goes smoothly. However, the battery status and similar jobs gets disabled. I read somewhere in the internet that this bug is in the particular kernel version and affects this particular motherboard MCP67MV. I have tried three Kubuntu 8.10 releases (i) beta release, (ii) RC and (iii) released versions. All of them gives the same boot problem. Since I believe it is a kernel problem, it must also exist in other Intrepid versions of Ubuntu.

[Sebastian Grans (minus)]

This bug has been with me since 8.10 and is still a bug in 9.04.

I've had another issue that is related to this. Which is that during the first part of the boot process, where the 'blob' is going back and forth, it locks up till I press the start button on my laptop. This bug is not present in 9.04.

I'm attaching my lshw and an acpidump in case you need it. Just tell me if there is anything more you need that can help.

[Sebastian Grans (minus)]

I noticed that Bug #272247 seems to fit my description in the above post.

Anyhow: here is my acpidump

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

The usplash package has been superseded by plymouth and has been removed from the Ubuntu archive. Closing all related bugs.