Fwd: Ubuntu CD

[Andrew Shugg]

Bill Thomson said:
> Hi,
> just received my Ubuntu CD, but am having problems with it.
> It boots up ok but take over 4 mins to get a GUI up. When I hit the
> install icon it takes another 4 mins to get to the first (language)
> screen, then another 5 mins to get to the date screen after which it
> hangs indefinitely (I gave up after another 5 mins) although there
> appears to be activity from CD and HD. I reran boot up after checking
> the CD which reports ok but the same thing happens.
> I am using a P4 running at 2GHz with a 60Gb hard disc partitioned with
> Windows ME on the first partition and Fedora Core 4 on the 2nd. My
> intention was to overwrite the existing FC4 with Ubuntu. Is this
> feasable? Can you shed any light on the install problem?
> Kind regards
> Bill Thomson.

Hi Bill,

Your email was forwarded to the ubuntu-au mailing list for Australian
users.  Please CC the list if you'd like to respond.

I suggest there may not be enough RAM on the PC for the Ubuntu Live
installer to start up in GUI mode.  Do you have more than 256 megabytes
of RAM?

If not, there is an "alternate" CD with a different installer that may
work better for you.  You'll need to download it and burn it to a CD
yourself though which may be a bit off-putting.  You can either get the
torrent file (ubuntu-6.06.1-alternate-i386.iso.torrent) and then
download the complete ISO file via BitTorrent, or just download the
complete ISO file (ubuntu-6.06.1-alternate-i386.iso) from your local
mirror site.

If you do have more than 256MB of RAM, and your CD test found no errors,
then I would think the Ubuntu Live installer is having a disagreement
with your hardware for some reason.

Have you tried the "safe graphics mode" when booting from the CD?

Your CD drive may also be slow - and booting up a live system from CD 
is a lot slower than from hard disk anyway.  I just tried booting the
Ubuntu 6.06 CD on a Pentium-4 1.8GHz with 1GB of RAM, and it took
several minutes to get to the desktop.

While the graphical system is loading, you can get back to the text mode
and look at the console log by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F8.  That may show
what is triggering the problem.  You can also get to a text console
login with Ctrl-Alt-F1 and try 'dmesg|less' to look through the system
boot messages from the kernel.

You may find the Ubuntu forums helpful for more assistance.

  http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

Regards,

Andrew S.

-- 
Andrew Shugg <andrew at neep.com.au>                   http://www.neep.com.au/

"Just remember, Mr Fawlty, there's always someone worse off than yourself."
"Is there?  Well I'd like to meet him.  I could do with a good laugh."