13.10 only boots to purple screen

[deerhunter0210]

I installed 13.10 on to an old PC, I had iso on USB and booted, Ubuntu loaded and i choose to do the full install. The installation completed and restarted the PC and booted normally, But instead of bringing up the Ubuntu name with dots underneath it just brought up a purple screen.... Im downloading 12.04 LTS and going to try that later incase the 13.10 download was corrupt.

Any ideas why this happened...

[fantab]

If you fear 'corrupt download' then you should always confirm the integrity of the download with both, md5sum check (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM) and sha256sum check (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToSHA256SUM).

Give more info about your "old PC", like its RAM, CPU and Graphics etc...

[deerhunter0210]

Intel CORE 2 DUO E4300
SATA DVD+/-RW (DL/DF) LightScribe Drive
250-GB Serial ATA 3.0-Gb/s Hard Drive (7200 rpm)
2-GB DDR2 Synch DRAM PC2-5300 (667-MHz) Non-ECC (2 x 1-GB)
Realtek ALC888 High Definition audio codec

[grahammechanical]

I am running an "old" machine like that with half the RAM that you have and I am using 14.04 development branch. The issue might be to do with the video driver. When we run the live session we use the open source video driver, Nouveau. When we install and tick to install third party software we also activate a proprietary driver. There are two things that you can try.

1) Re-install without ticking install third party software. This is the method I use when I test Ubuntu ISO images or install a new ISO image.

2) At the Grub menu select Recovery Mode and then select Resume. With 13.10 we find recovery mode under the Advanced Options For Ubuntu sub-menu. If you get to a working desktop you can experiment with video drivers using the Additional Drivers utility. In 13.10 Additional Drivers is a tab in Software and Updates, which is in System Settings.

Regards.

[mörgæs]

Nouveau is a driver for Nvidia cards. For other cards other drivers are in use.

Deerhunter, before proceeding please post which card you use.

[deerhunter0210]

grahammechanical - Thanks for the tips, i will try these tomorrow
Morgaes - Its an AMD card

[mörgæs]

Fine, but which AMD card?

If you are able to do a live boot please post the results from

lspci | grep -i vga

It's not a given fact that there are more than one driver to choose from.

[fantab]

Some AMD are well supported by the 'open source' driver, some need the proprietary driver. It is important that you tell us what Graphics card model you are using.
Post the output of the command morgaes requests... "lspci | grep -i vga".

Before you install Ubuntu, first "TRY Ubuntu" from DVD/USB. If you are booting to a 'black screen' or any other graphical issues append the 'nomodeset' option to the kernel line as instructed HERE (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132&p=10069997#post10069997).
'Nomodeset' will disable the video modesetting and use the generic opensource graphics driver at boot.
After successfully installing Ubuntu you WILL have to install the real driver for your Graphics card.