Lucid alpha-3 fails to boot completely on Averatec 3280, Jetway, and gBox P4

[Peter Belew]

I downloaded the Ubuntu Lucid alpha-3 live/desktop ISO yesterday and tried to run it on 5 different systems. In each case, I booted the CD, tried the CD test in some cases, and requested running the system live.

For two of the systems, the system froze up while booting, usually at the point a rotating 'wait' cursor appears; for another, boot completed but logging in to X kept failing, and for the remaining two systems, the system completed booting with few problems.

Here are the systems:

'eros' - an Averatec 3280 laptop.
  This system freezes up when the rotating cursor appears during X startup.
  It has been running Lucid alpha, updated up to just before alpha-3 was released, with some serious display bugs.
  It had been running Karmic, with a serious bug relating to the cardbus slot.
  It also runs Jaunty 9.04 with no significant problems.

'lightning' - a system with a Jetway EMxxxx motherboard and VIA VIA Samuel 2 CPU
  This system also hangs up during boot.
  It has been running Lucid alpha, updated up to just before alpha-3 was released, with a bug related to the display for tty consoles.

'billy' - a gBox P4 with a Celeron CPU
  This system boots up, but when the system tries to boot into Gnome, it immediately logs off, showing a login dialog box. Then when I try to log in with user 'ubuntu' and a blank password, the same thing happens.
  This has been running Karmic fairly well.

'max' - an old computer with an AMD-K6 400 mHz cpu and 512 mb of RAM.
  This system has been running Ubuntu 8.04 and FreeBSD 7.1 with no problems, despite the slow cpu. It hasn't run later Ubuntu versions previously. It boots the Lucid alpha-3 live CD with no significant problems. I may actually install alpha-3 on this system.

'dude' - a Dell 400SC with an Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.26GHz
  This system has been running Jaunty and is very stable.
   It seems to run the alpha-3 live CD reasonably well.
   I am likely to upgrade to the final release version when it comes out in April.
  In the meantime, it is my main system and a web server.

I will post information on each of these computers in following comments.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Regarding to the Averatec laptop 'eros':

This will not boot past the appearance of the rotating 'wait' cursor during booting the live CD

Some bugs while running earlier 'lucid': Bug #495553, Bug #508456, Bug #436341,Bug #526862.

I am enclosing some informational and log files generated on the current pre-beta-3 system.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Regarding the system 'lightning' using the Jetway motherboard:

This will not boot past the appearance of the rotating 'wait' cursor during booting the live CD.

Earlier bugs for this system: Bug #448911.

I am enclosing some informational and log files generated on the current pre-beta-3 system.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Regarding the gBox system 'billy':

This system is currently running Karmic, with no significant problems.

When I try to run the Lucid alpha-3 live CD, the system boots to the point where the system tries to log in to Gnome. Apparently it does log in automatically without a password, but immediately logs out, and displays a login dialog. (This happens so fact that I didn't realize that it's apparently doing that). After that, each time I log in with user 'ubuntu' and null password, it immediately displays the login dialog. Initially, I thought this meant it was rejecting the login, but now I believe it was as I just described.

This may have some relation to Bug #526862, observed on my Averatec laptop and by other people, where running some program in a terminal causes Gnome to log out.

This system triple-boots into XP, Linux, and FreeBSD, and has been stable otherwise.

I'm I am enclosing some informational and log files generated on the current Karmic Linux version.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Regarding the 400 mHz AMD-P6 system 'max':

This system has been running the previous LTS system, and seems to run the alpha-3 system reasonably well. I'm likely to upgrade to 10.04 alpha-3 soon, since this isn't a critical system.

It also runs FreeBSD 7.1 well, given its slow speed, by today's standards.

I'm enclosing some info and log files generating while running this Lucid alpha-3 system from the live CD.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Regarding the Dell 400SC system 'dude'

This system currently runs 'Jaunty', and is my main desktop system and server for various things.

It seems to run the Lucid alpha-3 well from the live CD, so I will most likely upgrade when the final release of Lucid comes out in April, assuming there aren't any significant regressions.

I'm enclosing some info and log files generating while running this Lucid alpha-3 system from the live CD.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Regarding to the Averatec laptop 'eros':

Today I upgraded it using the alpha-3 alternate CD. I updated first with just the CD, disconnected from the Internet, rebooted, then found there were a few updates online and installed those. All the bugs regarding the screen driver still exist. The only changed I noticed is that now Alt-F1, not Alt-F7, is used to switch back to X mode from a text console (but the text consoles are still not functioning).

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Regarding the 400 mHz AMD-P6 system 'max': (See comment #4 above):

While the live CD booted Ok on this system, using an appropriate display driver and screen resolution, upgrading using the alternate CD and Internet for module sources resulted in a virtually unbootable system, and took many hours. I've submitted the details in Bug #530334.

The good news is that eventually I was able to achieve a useful installation, but it took over half a day and a lot of careful work to do this.

[Søren Bredlund Caspersen (soeren-b-c)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

Generally bug reports are supposed to cover just one bug. You seem to be reporting several different issues in the same report. Could I ask you to report each issue as a separate bug. You may also want to read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage, to make sure you report your issues against the right package in Ubuntu.
In the meantime I'm going to mark this bug as incomplete.

Thank you.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Thank you for the feedback. I will file some separate bugs - in fact it looks like a bug I thought I had reported regarding the jetway system was in fact not reported, so I will do so. This will be an openchrome driver bug, similar to some that have been reported on other Jetway motherboards with different Unichrome hardware.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

For the jetway console screen problem, which has gotten worse, see Bug #538893.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Ubuntu because there has been no activity for 60 days.]