Just a foreword, this is my first foray into anything Linux related. Please forgive me if my lingo isn't up to par.
I just installed Ubuntu 14.04 last night. After I removed the installation disk (when I was prompted to do such) and restarted, the computer started up and I was eventually prompted to put in my passphrase. After that was successfully accepted, the screen went black but my cursor still showed up and I was able to move it around. I tried ctrl+alt+del but to no avail. A few minutes of just the screen led to:
[121.855415] nouveau E[ DRM] GPU lockup - switch to software fbcon
[142.180021] nouveau E[Xorg[1254]] failed to idle channel 0xcccc0001 [Xorg[1254]]
With that second line repeating but with different numbers in the brackets. So I looked around for people in similar situations and found that most people went to GRUB and added "nomodeset" after quiet splash. However, I couldn't figure out how to deal with the $vt_handoff that was present right after "quiet splash" in GRUB. So, I just stuck nomodeset after $vt_handoff and hit ctrl+X.
After the encryption prompt working successfully (as it has every time), I was actually brought to the desktop screen. I thought I had fixed the situation when a problem report window popped up asking me to support the bug report and the screen went fuzzy. It made it difficult for me to document what the bug report contained but I was able to make some stuff out:
Executable path
/usr/bin/Xorg
Package
Xserver-xorg-Core 2: 1.15.1-0ubuntu2
ProblemType
Crash
Title
Xorg crashed with SIGABRT
Apport Version
2.14.1-0ubuntu3.2
Architecture
Amd64
At this point, it was difficult to discern what was in the report. Moving the cursor around somehow caused the screen to look better for a bit but scrolling down through report made things difficult again.
I restarted again after that to see that I'm back to a black screen with the cursor which leads me to believe that "nomodeset" did not stick and I'll have to reapply it.
The computer with the problems is a Dell Dimension E521 with BIOS 1.1.11. I did the 64-Bit install from a Live Disc while using Windows XP.
Does anybody have an idea what to do? If you guys needs more info on the computer, I'll get is ASAP. Thank you.
lspci | grep VGA
. Also while running in the Live CD you saw any of those problems?sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade