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

[Stephen Williams]

John,

My suggestion was a completely clean install of 10.04 LTS rather than a 
downgrade of an existing 11.04 installation.

You could try starting the install from USB stick rather than CD-ROM, but I 
don't expect you to get much further if there are other issues causing 
trouble. You could also try running Ubuntu from CD-ROM or USB stick (i.e. the 
try Ubuntu option rather than install). If it runs there is an install option 
from there. If you can run Ubuntu live from CD-ROM or USB stick you should 
also be able to backup any vital data before a clean install of 10.04 LTS.

As to latest kernel and nVidia drivers, I've had this problem with them on my 
Gentoo installation. It was cured with the addition of:

"vmalloc=256Mb" 

to the kernel line of grub.conf. I believe that Ubuntu 11.04 uses grub2, so 
you may have to add the entry to the appropriate grub config files.

Steve Williams.

On Sunday 22 May 2011 10:22:26 john davis wrote:
> 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.