Intrepid continues to disappoint

I started Xubuntu, then went away and worked on my laptop for awhile. When I came back, the screen was black -- which is fine, a couple of times previously I had returned then jiggled the mouse and the desktop came back. However this time after jiggling the mouse, the hard drive activity-light became very busy and the screen remained black. I watched for a few minutes, the hard drive stayed busy and the screen stayed black.

I needed to go into town to do some shopping, so left Xubuntu doing whatever it was doing. I returned about 30 minutes later and there was a dialog window on the black screen, stating this:

Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode
Your screen, graphics card, and input device settings could not be detected correctly. You will need to configure these yourself.

There was an "OK" button, however both keyboard and mouse were dead. So, I had to depress the power switch for 4 seconds to do a forced power-off.

I haven't started Xubuntu up since then. My enthusiasm for Ubuntu, whatever flavor, has waned somewhat.

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Comments

Same Problem with Eeebuntu
Username: John Biles
Hello BarryK, I have Eeebuntu installed on my EeePC 900 series and the screensaver has kicked in and the screen has gone black. Moving the mouse or pressing the keyboard like you describe does nothing. I too have to press the "ON" button to also shutdown my Eee and reboot. As you've also notice this doesn't happen all the time? Personally I find original Debian packages work more often in Puppy than their Ubuntu counterparts.

bulletproofX yeah right...
Username: cb88
"barry ... I think sidux would probably be more up your alley... NOTE OF WARNING :-) : sidux can be highly unstable that is why you must browse their forums and get in the loop on what is stable and what isn't just doing a dist-upgrade on sidux is probably a bad idea you have to poke around and find out what is gonna work and what isn't the upside is that it is probably even more upto date than ubuntu (debian sid direct.. whearas ubuntu uses a snapshot of sid iirc) I was haveing kernel issues on the kernel i was using as well as KDE crashing but a friend of mine is using it and he has it stable might be worth a look and you barry seem to have a knack for best version hunting :-)

Sidux
Username: Sage
"For all the reasons cited by cb88, above, I had suggested that Sidux, the unstable branch, would benefit from the expert input of Barry. When it's good, it's very good. It also comes in 64-bit. Moreover, being German, apart from those odd quirks of their Law, it is capable of incorporating all the codecs that folks want. But, best of all, we have a spy in the camp.... Calling Hr Ulrich.

xubuntu fatness
Username: raymundo dionicio
"xubuntu: big, non-standard xfce, apps lacking on default install, erratic network behavior. debian xfce desktop: nice, small, rock solid, relatively fast, gnome developed apps does not install well vector linux: blasting fast, pretty, stable, standard version lacks internationalization, small repositories. The best option to enjoy a multi-desktop enviroment. zenwalk: my old favorite, late distros not very well baked. funny things in a formerly excelent community, very good internationalization. mising absolute and new others.

Nimblex: an extreme modular linux
Username: raymundo dionicio
"Barry: If any free hour, may I suggest to enjoy exploring this little romanian distro by Bogdan Rădulescu? Nimblex? Is quite rooted on slax but its modularity amuse me... Is very stable as long as you do not left it plugged to the cloud. An really is a little toy. ;)

Tags: woof