[Sussex] New Ubuntu (11.04) older PC (about 5 y.o.) and how, to get it sorted - possible further issue.......

[john davis]

Wotcha List,

Well I read up the link that was posted in reply to my original question,
and also Steve Williams suggestion about downgrading it back to 10.04 (the
LTS version, which had been working fine before the upgrading malarkey).

It doesn't seem to matter much what version I try, I can't install anything
from disk and the package manager doesn't seem to support down grading in
any way.

I did the download of both the AMD64 and i386 versions of 10.04.2 LTS, the
md5sum's confirmed the downloads as good, and it doesn't matter whether I
burn the disks on my PC or my Aunts, when we try to boot the disk(s), we get
a basic splash that shows the 2 small icons at the bottom, we then click
those (or hit enter), it asks about language support and we just leave that
at English, then when it gets to the "what do you want to do" options (try
Ubuntu without installing, Install Ubuntu, etc etc) we hit enter on
whichever option, the screen goes black and after about 30 seconds to a
minute, we get a page of startup dialogue that ends with a line that says
about "Clocksource tsc unstable" and it won't go any further than that.

I've googled to see what that means, and hopefully what I might do about it,
but it goes straight over my head. I've tried hitting F6 for the other
options and tried it with no acpi etc etc, but to no avail. Selecting or
switching off some of those options hasn't got us anywhere.

Whatever the "Clocksource tsc unstable" thing actually alludes to, it
doesn't seem to stop us being about to get the PC booted, whether into
windows, or into one of the older (previous linux versions, in "grub
parlance") kernels. the 11.04 is installed, and working, but not with the
actual 11.04 kernel version. With one of the older versions. The latest
kernel version is, seemingly, suffering from problems with the nvidia
driver. We can't boot into it to get to a CLI interface, as even if we did,
I don't know what to do to get the vesa or whatever generic driver running
to get a GUI, so we can see what's going on and try to install an older
version of the nvidia driver to get it working.

I can't help wondering if this isn't something to do with the all new, shiny
"Unity" desktop ? That will work with her PC, but booted into an older
kernel (one from 10.04, as we had the same problems with 10.10).

Of course, none of this can be sorted out if I can't get one of the disk
copies of 10.04 to install, to revert it back to it's original, working
properly, state.

Does anyone have any ideas please ?

regards

John D.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/attachments/20110522/9926c785/attachment.htm>