Month: November 2009

Acer 4530 and Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10)

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Karmic has been out for a week now. Finally got over my insecurities and opted for the complete distro upgrade in the update manager and let it run overnight. By morning it was almost done, just cleaned up a few packages and fixed menu.lst and we were done.

But a reboot showed that it wasn’t to be a smooth transition. There were 2 kernels installed, 2.6.31-14 and 2.6.28-16. Trying out the first one caused my boot up screen to flicker and it didn’t even reach gdm. The flickr even prevented me from logging in. I think it was around the point when the console read “Starting consolefont and terminal yada yada” when it started doing it.

A search on the forums suggested that the problem might be because of the nvidia drivers. Which was exactly the problem. As per my earlier post, since I had installed Nvidia drivers manually, the updated didn’t install the drivers.

So, to fix it, I booted into the recovery kernel and dropped into a root terminal with networking. But for some reason the wifi wouldn’t work so I couldn’t connect to the net for synaptic to install the correct nvidia drivers (yes, they’re using 185.18.36 now, which is slightly later than the one I installed). But fortunately, I still had the drivers in my home directory. So kicked it off from the command line (no need to sudo since I was root).

But then the nvidia installer complains saying I need to be in init mode 3. So I quit the installer and ran telinit 3 (as mentioned in the installer itself!) and I was given a nice little login prompt.

Logged in and then ran the installer as sudo and waited for it to complete. Rebooted and everything works now.

My desktop works fine, and my MacOs ubuntu theme is intact.

PS: Initially, since I was having problems with kernel 2.6.31-14, I booted using 2.6.28-16 which actually worked and was able to log me in via gdm. But the touchpad wasn’t working. This seemed like a really strange issue. So I searched the forums for this and found this post. The touchpad started working after putting it in the options file and rebooting.

But with the new kernel, after fixing the flicker issue,  it was causing the mouse to be a bit sluggish and the scroll wasn’t working either. So I tried commenting it out and rebooting and the mouse is working fine now.