9.10 Upgrage Issues

[_glen]

Last week, I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and began having a number of problems. Here are a few:

- Boot-up intermittently freezes as the desktop becomes visible.
- Gnome terminal usually won't receive keyboard input and then hangs when I try to close it.
- Attempts to reinstall applications using the Synaptic package manager fail; the installation just stops, dialog won't close, must force shut.
- Wireless network login fails about half the time (asks for the WEP key that it already knows, and the hangs if I re-enter it.)

And then at other times everything works fine. Any help would be appreciated.


Glen

[phillw]

Last week, I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and began having a number of problems. Here are a few:

- Boot-up intermittently freezes as the desktop becomes visible.
- Gnome terminal usually won't receive keyboard input and then hangs when I try to close it.
- Attempts to reinstall applications using the Synaptic package manager fail; the installation just stops, dialog won't close, must force shut.
- Wireless network login fails about half the time (asks for the WEP key that it already knows, and the hangs if I re-enter it.)

And then at other times everything works fine. Any help would be appreciated.


Glen

Hmmm... regardless of the fact you've recently upgraded to 9.10, these sort of intermittent errors sound more like a hardware problem.

Firstly, I'd boor, drop into MemTest and let it give your memory a good checking over. Have you recently added any new hard-ware ? On desktop units, loose leads or cards can cause these sort of errors.

Booting from a LiveCD or GParted CD , run an fsck on your Ubuntu installation:


It's best to run a file system check from a LiveCD without mounting the hard drive. Most LiveCDs won't mount the hard drive anyway unless you tell them to, but they usually do use the swap area.
We should never run a file system check on a mounted partition.

The easiest Live CD to use is GParted -- LiveCD (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) because it's made for doing all kinds of work with file systems and partitions. All you need to do with that is right-click on the partition and look for the option 'Check' and click on it. Wait a while and your file system check will be complete. You won't need to know any commands.

The Ubuntu Live CDs are fine, you just have to know a couple of commands, here is my favorite one for an ext3 file ssytem to begin with,


sudo e2fsck -C0 -p -f -v /dev/hda2
Where" hda2 is your ext3 (Ubuntu) partition, if not, replace those letters and numbers with whatever suits your particular computer.

Here's one that's a bit more powerful,


sudo e2fsck -y -f -v /dev/hda2
It does no harm and probably a lot of good to run that one once in a while.

This one's only for coping with bad blocks in your hard disk, it should rarely be needed,


sudo e2fsck -c -c -k -v /dev/hda2
Type 'man e2fsck' if you want to learn what all those options will do for you, there may be more that could help you. You can customize your own commands by reading the man pages and picking out options you think will make the command do what you want.

man e2fsck
Regards, Herman :smile: Mem test & fsck should remove two of the posibilities. Do post back how you get on.

Regards,

Phill.

[_glen]

Thanks. I'll give it a try.

Glen