11.10 screensaver in a loop, can not log in

[javaruby]

Upon startup - either from a full shutdown or restart/suspend - a small dialog box appears against the purple background . The box says

other ..
<MyUsername>
Password:
[Text box with focus]

Guest session

When i put in an incorrect password, i see "Invalid passwor, please try again".

When I put in the CORRECT password for MyUsername the screen goes blank briefly, I see the NVidia bootup screen, then the whole process repeats.

What's going on here?

[electroman6913]

It sounds like your desktop environment is not loading. it could be corrupted or a config file might be messed up. when grub shows up see if you can log in to recovery mode. If that happened to me I probably install a second desktop environment and see if it would boot in to that.

[javaruby]

It sounds like your desktop environment is not loading. it could be corrupted or a config file might be messed up. when grub shows up see if you can log in to recovery mode. If that happened to me I probably install a second desktop environment and see if it would boot in to that.

yes I came to the same conclusion. I have had too many issues with 11.10, I have overwritten with 10.10. Let's hope that does better.

[javaruby]

SAME THING IN 10.10 !!!!

I just installed 10.10 on a freshly reformatted partition. I was able to reboot a couple of times. But after going into SUSPEND mode, the laptop crashed. Then after reboot the LOGIN screen is shown, I enter my password, but then the screen goes black for a moment, and then the logins screen is redisplayed.

I AM able to "drop to root" to look at files in the O/S. But I don't know what to look for. The files in /var/log do not "speak" to me of what the problem is.


Help much appreciated (even reinstalling a different version is not a solution ?!!) !

[jayd512]

After getting bumped back on the login screen, hit Ctrl+Alt+F1.
Then:

dmesg | tail -50 > dmesg.text

If needed, use a flash drive to retrieve the text file. Post the output.

[javaruby]

There's a bunch of

[drm] nouveau <blah> Allocating FIFO number 2
[drm] nouveau <blah> nouveau_channel_alloc: initialised FIFO 2
[drm] nouveau <blah> Couldn't find matching output script table
[drm] nouveau <blah> Couldn't find matching output script table
[drm] nouveau <blah> Couldn't find matching output script table
[drm] nouveau <blah> Couldn't find matching output script table
[drm] nouveau <blah> Couldn't find matching output script table
[drm] nouveau <blah> Couldn't find matching output script table


I saw this bug that appears to have some relevance - but could see a fix.

https bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/556856

[javaruby]

Looks like nouveau is the issue, from a number of issues/posts seen by googling.. It's apparently associated with nvidia cards.

Not sure how/if possible to de-install nouveau -and what would happen then in terms of which "default" video drivers would become active instead.

I am trying to find out if there's any hope at all for this laptop to run ubuntu.

[jayd512]

You might want to try the nomodeset option on start-up.

Take a look through this page, on the Ubuntu Forum: [SOLVED] How to set NOMODESET and other kernel boot options in grub2 - Ubuntu Forums
Scroll down to the section labeled: How to temporarily set kernel boot options on an installed OS (not wubi)

If it works, there are steps to make the change permanent.

[javaruby]

i'm trying to follow the following post on how to remove nouveau and use proprietary nvidia instead. let's see..

http://www.socialblogr.com/2010/10/h...ntu-10-10.html

[jayd512]

You shouldn't have to remove Nouveau. See here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bi...erHowto/Nvidia
Also, see this page for manual Nvidia driver installation: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaManual