dpiddyTx
October 18th, 2011, 01:57 AM
I kept experiencing issues with plymouth freezing after my upgrade to 11.10 from 11.04 but I finally got around it and just wanted to share my findings in the hope that others may find it useful to some extent...
I spent hours battling that stupid Dell efi boot loader only to get grub running and then plymouth freezing. I tried many many workarounds that google told me about and none of them worked. It turns out that my default linux kernel in grub is a 'pae' version. I'm not a linux expert but I can read, and I know my previous release had an option to enable 'pae' in the nvidia-settings so I'm guessing my laptop supported it but I never specifically enabled it. My nvidia-settings in 11.10 do not have a pae option so I have to guess there's some compatibility issue somewhere. So I'm not sure why the pae kernel was chosen during the upgrade but if I just wait for grub to load, choose 'previous versions' and choose my latest non-pae 3.0 kernel release then it boots up fine on 11.10.
#sudo grub-set-default ...
Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-11-generic
Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-11-generic (recovery mode)
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-generic
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-generic (recovery mode)
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-generic-pae
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-generic-pae (recovery mode)
grub-set-default (GRUB) 1.99-12ubuntu5
Linux 3.0.0-12-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
And in case your wondering Dell's efi boot loader is awful, I now hate it with a passion deeper than the fiery 7th layer of hell. (It's a work laptop, windows installed first, I can't change it, procedural politics bs etc.)
A few things still bother me that I'd love to find some answers for though ...
1) I'm still confused where the pae kernel version came from and why. Since grub seems to give me a choice of pae or non-pae kernel I'm assuming software has a choice to use it or not use it, regardless if it's supported or not?
2) I'm still wondering if Dell's efi boot loader is what mucked this up, though I found no mention of pae anywhere in there. Could it possibly mislead ubuntu during an upgrade?
3) Could this even be related to pae? I'm not an expert, it's just that pae is the only difference I observed between working and not-working.
I spent hours battling that stupid Dell efi boot loader only to get grub running and then plymouth freezing. I tried many many workarounds that google told me about and none of them worked. It turns out that my default linux kernel in grub is a 'pae' version. I'm not a linux expert but I can read, and I know my previous release had an option to enable 'pae' in the nvidia-settings so I'm guessing my laptop supported it but I never specifically enabled it. My nvidia-settings in 11.10 do not have a pae option so I have to guess there's some compatibility issue somewhere. So I'm not sure why the pae kernel was chosen during the upgrade but if I just wait for grub to load, choose 'previous versions' and choose my latest non-pae 3.0 kernel release then it boots up fine on 11.10.
#sudo grub-set-default ...
Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-11-generic
Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-11-generic (recovery mode)
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-generic
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-generic (recovery mode)
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-generic-pae
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-generic-pae (recovery mode)
grub-set-default (GRUB) 1.99-12ubuntu5
Linux 3.0.0-12-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
And in case your wondering Dell's efi boot loader is awful, I now hate it with a passion deeper than the fiery 7th layer of hell. (It's a work laptop, windows installed first, I can't change it, procedural politics bs etc.)
A few things still bother me that I'd love to find some answers for though ...
1) I'm still confused where the pae kernel version came from and why. Since grub seems to give me a choice of pae or non-pae kernel I'm assuming software has a choice to use it or not use it, regardless if it's supported or not?
2) I'm still wondering if Dell's efi boot loader is what mucked this up, though I found no mention of pae anywhere in there. Could it possibly mislead ubuntu during an upgrade?
3) Could this even be related to pae? I'm not an expert, it's just that pae is the only difference I observed between working and not-working.