The installation of Ubuntu 11.10 was going pretty smooth until after the install finished, it had to restart in order to boot into the freshly new operating system. The system went into the BIOS and appeared like it booted in to the MBR, but when it got to GRUB it stopped and all I saw was Ubuntu 11.10 black screen. I myself thought it was a problem with GRUB because I did not see a menu of which kernel’s to boot from but it wasn’t til I found it was a bug that alot of people suffer from. I don’t recall where the post came from, I will go back and try to find it again to give credit to the author
To solve this problem when Ubuntu 11.10 boots and you get the black screen, hit ALT-F2, this will open another TTY so that you can log into the system with the user you created during the installion. The file that needs to be edited is /etc/default/grub. Here is an example taken from my Grub configuration file:
karl@Ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/default/grub # If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update # /boot/grub/grub.cfg. # For full documentation of the options in this file, see: # info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration' GRUB_DEFAULT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="xforcevesa" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text # Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs # This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains # the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...) #GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef" # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only) #GRUB_TERMINAL=console # The resolution used on graphical terminal # note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE # you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo' #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480 # Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux #GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true # Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries #GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" # Uncomment to get a beep at grub start #GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"
The important line is: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”xforcevesa”. You need to substitute xforcevesa with whatever video card you have, if you don’t know I would suggest xforcevesa. Below is the list of options you have to choose from.
- Intel video card: i915.modeset=1 or i915.modeset=0
- nVidia: nomodeset
- Generic: xforcevesa