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Dat Chu
Asked: 2011-04-24 15:52:52 +0800 CST

Boot into recovery console

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I found out that since my brand new Alienware M17xR3 laptop is running Intel Sandy Bridge, I have two options to get it to work:

  1. Run 11.04 which has experimental Sandy Bridge support in the kernel
  2. Disable nVidia Optimus if I want to use nvidia driver

Option 2 is not possible because there is no option in the BIOS even though I have already updated to the latest version from Dell's support site.

Thus, it comes to my question: my attempt to install 11.04 works until I have to reboot. After which all I see is a brief image of the Ubuntu logo with 5 dots. Then, the screen keeps flickering like crazy with different colors. How do I boot up my Ubuntu with a barebone, no frill so I can keep running apt-get upgrade every couple of days?

11.04

2 Answers

  1. you need to edit your grub2 menu to boot into a console rather than auto-start the GUI.

    I haven't fooled with 11.04 yet, but I think you need to edit /etc/default/grub as root to give you a terminal upon booting.

    Try the instructions here: http://ubuntuguide.net/boot-into-consolecommand-line-when-startup-ubuntu-9-10 It's for an earlier version, but I think it uses grub2 also.

    If you need to get to a command prompt so you can edit grub, download and burn the "ultimate boot CD", which has tomsrtbt on it.

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  2. It sounds like your problem can be solved much more simply by installing the kernel from the 11.04 repository.

    http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.28/ or http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/linux-image-2.6.38-8-generic

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