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Hi. I just downloaded Kubuntu 9.04 and burned the ISO on CD, after which I tried booting from the CD to test drive the OS. Thing is, the system just hangs up after trying to load the CD. I see the graphical 'Kubuntu' logo with the animated lines dashing back and forth. After a few minutes everything just goes blank.

Specs are : AMD Athlon X2 4800, ECS A780GM-A (AMD 780G chipset, SB700 southbridge), 2GB DDR2-800, 1TB WD Caviar Green, Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium PCIE, LG W2252TQ LCD.

I've tried Ubuntu 9.04 earlier, actually, with the same results. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

PS - Ubuntu 9.04 test drives ok on my laptop. Laptop Specs : Acer Aspire 4520, AMD Turion X2 TL-58 (1.9GHz), 2GB DDR2-667, Nvidia Geforce 7000M, Realtek HD audio, 320GB Seagate SATA HDD.

There are a few possibilities here:

• Failing CD-ROM drive
• Media that has gone bad
• Some hardware incompatibility

I'm not very familiar with Ubuntu installation media, but most distros have boot options where you can disable some optional things, like ACPI, SCSI or the floppy drive.

Try disabling some different boot options and see what happens.

Ubuntu's not the distro that I tend to use...but I pulled the iso down and tried it in VirtualBox. You can turn off the "quiet" option in the boot line. This may give you some additional information about where the boot sequence is hanging.

If you lose video, you could also try safe video mode. But I'd try to pull quiet off first to get more information.

(F6 to see the boot line options -- just delete the word "quiet")

Probably your cd drive.

Ok, thanks, fellas. I did a safe graphics mode boot, and it went well enough. Looks like I'm gonna need some proper drivers for my ATI HD4670, because the GUI gets screwed up when I reduce the desktop resolution to 800x600.

ronch wrote:

Ok, thanks, fellas. I did a safe graphics mode boot, and it went well enough. Looks like I'm gonna need some proper drivers for my ATI HD4670, because the GUI gets screwed up when I reduce the desktop resolution to 800x600.

Install the Restricted Driver fglrx. It's closed-source and made by AMD themselves, rather than the default open-source one.

Game_boy wrote:

Install the Restricted Driver fglrx. It's closed-source and made by AMD themselves, rather than the default open-source one.

Just to clarify that -- you have two options here.

1) Install the driver through System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers. This will install a version of fglrx that has been repackaged by the Ubuntu people to work smoothly with Ubuntu's package management system. This is by far the easiest method, but you will probably get a driver that is a few months old.

2) Download the Linux driver installer from ATI's web site. This will get you the latest Catalyst driver for Linux, but installation can be a bit fiddly, sometimes requiring a bit of Google-fu and mucking around with your xorg.conf file.

Personally I'd start with #1, and attempt option #2 only if you seem to be having issues with the driver from the Ubuntu repository.

just brew it! wrote:

Personally I'd start with #1, and attempt option #2 only if you seem to be having issues with the driver from the Ubuntu repository.

Having done this for a friend, once, unless you need the latest ATI driver for something in particular, JBI is absolutely right that #1 is far more convenient.