9.10 Boot Issues

[wd5gnr]

Upgrade 9.04 to 9.10. Once it is running, it is OK although a few instability issues.

However, the first boot, generally two things happen. First, I get a bad X startup as though the NVidia driver is not there. If I tell it to exit to console, next time kdm restarts it is ok. Or I can manually stop/start kdm.

The other problem is most of the time my /home partition (on a raid volume) does not mount at start up. Or it mounts but does not show up. Sometimes this fixes itself in a few seconds. Sometimes I have to unmount and mount it manually from a console.

Is it just me?

[wd5gnr]

Gosh, am I really the only one this affects?

[joky28]

I had a similar problem. Upgraded to 9.10 with nvidia driver in use a got annoying "low graphics mode" message at boot time. Only "exit to console" got kdm starting and kde working. I tried dpg-reconfigure xserver-xorg which made it worse, no "low graphics mode" anymore just a corrupted screen. Trying dpk-reconfigure xorg brought me back to the beginning. Removing and re-installing xorg and kubuntu-desktop left xorg without any drivers installed. After installing xorg-drivers-all there was a mxture of sometime corrupted screens, black screens or the well known "low graphics mode". So i got fed up, did a clean install and copied back my home backup. Now the problems have disappeared.

A colleague has graphics related problems after the upgrade too using ati drivers. Every time he boots, compositing gets disabled and he has to re-enable it manually. So there seems to be an issue in the upgrade process.

[P4man]

there is a bug in the 9.04>9.10 updater which can result in karmic booting with the old jaunty kernel. Please open a terminal and verify you are running the 2.6.31.xx kernel. You can check this by typing

uname -a

[AtesComp]

This seems to be a problem with KDM installed with the new KDE in the proposed-updates.
See: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8340469

[wd5gnr]

Ok I think I understand my problem, sort of. I have a /raid partition that has a home directory mounted as /home <= /raid/home. Prior to 9.10 I never had any trouble with this setup.

However, apparently, now it will try to boot even if /dev/md0 (the raid device) is going through an fsck. So I guess I need to dig through the boot sequence and see what it will take to stall the boot if /raid is not mounted.

Now why this sometimes causes kdm to start trying to log in and hang, I don't know. I think that's only mildly related. But the normal case is it warns it can't enter the home directory and then that causes all the problems you'd expect. Of course, if /raid mounts in time, no problem.

Note: This seems to be related: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...oot+wait+mount

[AtesComp]

See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...06#post8420206 for "a" solution. KDM seems to have a timing problem waiting for the display or X or something. I've updated that thread with that solution.

[wd5gnr]

No I still have this problem. In particular, if /home needs an fsck when it boots then it will definitely try to start kdm before the fsck is complete and /home is remounted.

I am not sure if the fixes have taken care of the "normal" case where an fsck is not required.

[wd5gnr]

Spent more time on this. Definitely a problem when the raid drives are being fsck'd. So I wonder how many people have this problem and just don't ever get in the situation where an fsck occurs at boot.

Update: Rather than retype everything: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...77&postcount=5

[AtesComp]

The problem I had was solved. It is related to GDM being installed, but using KDM. The fix is now in karmic proposed updates as a GDM update.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...rg/+bug/491483