ubuntu bsod (blue screen of death) August 22, 2006
Posted by phairoh in linux, technology and software.trackback
<Update!>I just found the this article on Digg which sounds exactly like what my problem was. Apparently I did the right thing. I would just like to add my machine (IBM T42) to the ones listed in that article as a machine that has the bug.</Update!>
I had to load into Windows today on my laptop for the first time in at least a month in order to show my mother something that would help her at work. When I rebooted my laptop to get back to my beloved Ubuntu installation, I loaded into what can only be described as a Blue Screen of Death for Linux.
The Ubuntu loading screen came up fine, and it ran through all the normal installation checks, but then when it should have gone to the graphical login screen, it went to a text based login screen. I was confused! This was Linux! Linux doesn’t crash! Nothing could ever possibly ever ever ever go wrong with what is the glory that is Linux! (at least that is what all the hype would have you believe) Yet here there I was, faced with a text based login screen that I had never seen before, and before I could even type in my login name, the screen flashed and went to an actually blue screen! This screen told me something about my xorg being messed up (sorry, I don’t remember exactly what it said) and asked me whether I wanted to see some output. I said to myself, “sure! I’m a computer engineer! I can figure this out!” but what I saw was completely unintelligible to me. Something about not being able to find my screen, which of course makes no sense because if it couldn’t find my screen, how was it telling me that it couldn’t find my screen! I hit ok, and it sent me to a second output from this mysterious xorg that was even worse! There were all these crazy strings of characters that I can only assume where memory locations.
Having no immediate idea of what to do I did what any Windows user would do to fix the problem. I rebooted. Same thing happened. I rebooted again, this time using a different version of the Linux kernel that was listed in grub. Same thing happened. I rebooted one last time having remembered that earlier today, before I had rebooted into Windows, the Ubuntu auto update had loaded something. Perhaps that had messed up some how. I got to the text based login menu, logged in my account, and did the following:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Magically, I was told that there was a single update available: xserver! I installed it, rebooted, and thank goodness, Ubuntu was back!
Had that simple fix not worked, I have absolutely no idea what I would have done. I do not know nearly enough about Linux to do anything other than what I did. The only option that I would have had, as far as I can think of, would be to completely reinstall Ubuntu, as though I were using Windows and had to rebuild my machine.
I love using the command line, and I do so as much as I can, but I know nothing of how to fix things that are wrong with Ubuntu. I would love any help anyone can give on things I can read to enhance my Linux knowledge.
I’ve only seen this once before, myself. Oddly enough, it was on Ubuntu as well.
This was a known bug with an update to Xorg that was put out; if you weren’t able to fix it in that manner, you can often read /var/log/Xorg.0.log and you can usually get a handle on what’s happened
[...] Phairoh made an interesting post on his blog entitled ‘Ubuntu BSOD.’ In it he recounts the dreadful experience of having his X-server die and luckily it being fixed with an update. The very fact that he equated not being able to start X (a fixable problem wherein most of the system is still usable) with the dreaded M$ blue screen of death (from which there is no return) is revealing. It brought to a head in my mind an uneasiness I’ve been having with the new generation of linux users who never had to cut their teeth on the console in order to just get a working linux system up and running. Their expectations are much different it seems than those of us who learned linux prior to the year 2000. [...]