Startup failing

[Chao06]

Here's a video of exactly what it's doing:

YouTube - What my computer's doing

It's on a relatively fresh install of Jaunty on a Dell Inspiron 6000. I hadn't gotten to tweaking yet, but I had booted in. The screen was blank and unresponsive when I came back from work today. I believe I had set updates running before I left for work.

And I've also seen that text screen before. A while back my computer (same computer) would randomly shut off while I was watching a video, and it would flicker that screen (not sure if all the text is identical, it never stays up long enough, but I know at least several of the lines match).

Thanks,
David

[daark.child]

The system is starting up fine, but there seems to be a problem with the graphics. Try booting into recovery mode and selecting the option to repair the X server and see if that helps.

[D-cat]

That is definitely X autodetecting and using a video mode that exceeds the display's capability (either resolution or frequency/refresh rate). It's the exact situation why I like Sax2 (OpenSuSE) verses other video tools in Linux.

It used to be that you could press [Ctrl + Alt + -] (That's the keypad "-") and the screen would drop resolution. It seems from 8.04 on that hotkey has been disabled, but I suppose it's worth a shot. Then you should be able to use the Gnome configuration panel to fix the resolution (Might need screen-resolution-extra or xrandr).

Since I don't have much faith in that, I think daark has the right start, boot into recovery mode, or try [Ctrl + Alt + F1] from that messed up screen to drop to a text login console (If you use this method, log in as your user, then type sudo init 3 to kill the X server). Use xrandr from the recovery console to fix your resolution issue.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution

Use sudo apt-get install xrandr to install it if it isn't already.

sudo reboot restarts the computer.