karmic upgrade problem: boots to prompt and keyboard input very sketchy

[budge]

upon reboot after distribution upgrade from jaunty to karmic, boot process proceeds as normal past grub. then, bootsplash with white ubuntu symbol on black background comes on for several seconds before flickering back and forth to the last grub text. finally, the tty login prompt (not the gui one) comes up flickering in a pattern of 5 or 6 very short bursts of less than .1 seconds each, and then the text remains on screen for about 0.25 seconds before repeating the short bursts again. only during that .25 seconds of the cycle will the prompt accept keyboard input. this barely makes it possible to enter a login name, but impossible to enter a real password.

[edit]upon hitting the power button, the normal shutdown sequence appears to occur, and the bootsplash with the plain white ubuntu symbol comes back on (no flicker) before the machine powers off.

[edit] booted in live cd to look at logs. the kernel log seems reasonable, but there is an error regarding freeing an invalid pointer related to the boot screen. the xorg log shows that the core pointer and keyboard can't be found, and that the nvidia driver can't load due to improper screen config. if someone can tell me what other logs to look at I can do that, but in the next day or two I will probably give up and reinstall from the live cd.

[ojve (ojve)]

I have the very same problem, also with an nvidia card, could it be related to that?

I'm on an ASRock Nettop ION 330, connected by HDMI to an LCD TV.

[budge (brian-budge)]

could be, but i'm not sure. even if the nvidia driver can't load though (it shouldn't even try since upon upgrade i think that restricted drivers are disabled), the nv driver or vesa should kick in.

[Oliver (o-fairhall)]

[Ubuntu-x-swat] [Bug 454310] [NEW] karmic upgrade problem: boots to
prompt and keyboard input very sketchy

Hi, not suer if posting this reply correctly, but here goes...

I had the same symptoms. It seems to be related to the Nvidia drivers
having been built for the previous kernel. Booting into the upgraded
karmic doesn't seem to provide the usual prompt regarding graphics drivers.

I worked around the problem by booting into recovery mode, and when the
prompt of choices was presented, I chose to resume normal boot. This
takes one to a text mode normal login session (not root). I then
navigated to a subdirectory of my home directory, where I keep my source
files. I then installed the Nvidia drivers as usual, with the line:

sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run

Of course the text would vary for whichever version is applicable.

If one doesn't have a copy of the driver on hand, one could boot into a
live CD session, mount a suitable partition, and download to it.
Otherwise, I suppose it would be possible to edit xorg.conf to use other
drivers.

I can't clearly recall what I had done with my Nvidia drivers in the
past, though I suspect I had removed the Ubuntu package which handles
this automatically, in favour of manually installing the drivers from
nvidia.com. I suspect the upgrade reverts to an ubuntu package to handle
the drivers. I'm no expert though...