my clean install of ubuntu 9.10
Sunday, 15 November 2009 11:34 pm by noelposted in tech | tags: grub, karmic, linux, ubuntu
painful. not a lot but painful nonetheless. it was mostly because if grub–ubuntu’s boot loader. after going through the install process and restarting my workstation grub had other plans and didn’t load up the filesystem and therefore could not start linux and most of everything else. its apparently an issue with karmic koala as i found out from the forums. this ubuntu version is painful.
on first boot after the install, i got a message from the bootloader saying it couldn’t load … something named after a bunch of numbers with dashes in between. restart. on second boot it gave me the grub menu with the option of editing the boot commands before booting. i took the opportunity and tried editing the commands. after some why-the-heck-not deliberations i took out the line that started with the word “search” and proceeded to boot. and it did! now, i wanted to see if the settings stuck so i restarted the computer. i was presented with the grub menu again which means the initialization file (menu.lst) of grub is messed up or non-existent (it was the latter 
). after a couple of hours of axious searching in the ubuntu forums i was able to reinstall grub and had a proper menu.lst file.
the rest of the installation went fine. restoring my settings from backup was easier.
admitedly, there are really nice changes to the system but it is not the best ubuntu released mostly because the grub bootloader gave a lot of people headaches, me included. i later found out that the bootloader is a beta version that was included in the final release. bad idea. and then i get an occasional “pause”—application windows start to dim as if in deep thought and couldn’t be disturbed and after a few seconds wakes up again. i still have to find out what causes that. but at the moment i’m just glad my workstation is up and running again.
