windfix
June 19th, 2018, 08:02 PM
Posting this to assist any others with installations on Dell hardware. My fresh install of 18.04 on a Dell Studio 1440 worked fine until the first reboot; it then hung after the GRUB menu.
I pressed "e" during GRUB menu to edit the kernel parameters and removed "quiet" and "splash" so I could see all messages during boot. My machine was hanging on a message about leds:dell::kbd_backlight
Eventually, I found that there is a persistent bug in the kernel (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107651) relating to Dell keyboard backlights, dating back several years and yet unfixed. Thanks to Iván Jiménez, who pinned-down what was happening, and provided a work-around using
systemctl mask systemd-backlight@leds\:dell\:\:kbd_backlight.service
He notes that the problem is associated with the presence of a file
/var/lib/systemd/backlight/platform-dell-laptop:leds:dell::kbd_backlight
Steps:
From GRUB, select advanced options, then Root Shell.
Do:
mount -o remount,rw /
rm /var/lib/systemd/backlight/platform-dell-laptop:leds:dell::kbd_backlight
systemctl mask systemd-backlight@leds\:dell\:\:kbd_backlight.service
reboot
I pressed "e" during GRUB menu to edit the kernel parameters and removed "quiet" and "splash" so I could see all messages during boot. My machine was hanging on a message about leds:dell::kbd_backlight
Eventually, I found that there is a persistent bug in the kernel (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107651) relating to Dell keyboard backlights, dating back several years and yet unfixed. Thanks to Iván Jiménez, who pinned-down what was happening, and provided a work-around using
systemctl mask systemd-backlight@leds\:dell\:\:kbd_backlight.service
He notes that the problem is associated with the presence of a file
/var/lib/systemd/backlight/platform-dell-laptop:leds:dell::kbd_backlight
Steps:
From GRUB, select advanced options, then Root Shell.
Do:
mount -o remount,rw /
rm /var/lib/systemd/backlight/platform-dell-laptop:leds:dell::kbd_backlight
systemctl mask systemd-backlight@leds\:dell\:\:kbd_backlight.service
reboot