HP Compaq 615 issues

[keftes]

Hi, this is my first post on this forum and it feels like an important moment in my interaction so far with the linux world.

I've been a microsoft user since the MS-DOS era, but have made considerable efforts during the past 10 years to migrate to linux, none of which were successful up until now! I find Ultimate Edition (x64) excellent in almost every way, so I've installed it as the only OS both on my and my mother's HP Compaq 615 laptop (don't laugh, migrating to linux has taken me almost 10 years but getting my mother to use linux was the ultimate ease-of-use-test)!

Anyway, there's still a couple of minor things I need help with, so I'd appreciate any input on them:

1.Sometimes, for no apparent reason, Ultimate Edition 2.3 (x64) fails to boot. It gets to the “Ultimate Edition” splash screen and the loading bar stops at about a fifth of the way and the whole system just freezes. I don't know what to make of it.

2.Totem Movie Player used to be the preferred application for playing Xvid, divX, mp4 video etc but almost every time I tried to switch to fullscreen it would reboot the whole system (I kind of solved this one in the sense that I've stopped using Totem Movie Player as the preferred application for video. Instead I use Mplayer and it works just fine once you get the hang of its shortcut keys, but I thought I'd just share my experience anyway).

3.Audio took me a while to set up, but after I installed the alsa-driver-linuxant_1.0.20.3_k2.6.28_15_generic_ubuntu_amd64.deb.zip and followed the detailed instructions at https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s ... tion/61903 , it worked OK. If only I could find a way to keep my current audio driver from being automatically "updated", then I wouldn't have to redo the whole thing almost every other week or so (any ideas on this one?).

4.The weirdest – and most annoying if I may add – is what happens with the headphones. Under normal circumstances, when I boot without any headphones plugged in, I get sound from the system speaker, until I plug some headphones in, and that's great. The weird part starts when I plug or unplug my headphones during boot-up. Then, I either get sound from the headphones only or from the system speaker only. Occasionally I get no sound at all. The worst part is that things do not go back to normal even after I reboot. Usually, after each mishap of this sort, Ultimate Edition won't shut down. Instead there will be a series of unexpected log-outs (when selecting “shut-down”) and eventually forced power-downs (pushing the hardware power button continually) until things go back to normal. The whole process is a little frustrating (especially when I have friends over and try to show off my new non-microsoft laptop), so I try to fiddle with the headphone jacks as little as possible, especially during boot time.

Sorry for the bulky post, but I've waited for quite some time until I finally decided to actually stick with a linux distribution and burn the bridge leading back to microsoft, so I really want to make this work! Thanks again for a great OS.

Any and all ideas and comments welcome!

Cheers

[Moebius]

Hi keftes,

1.Sometimes, for no apparent reason, Ultimate Edition 2.3 (x64) fails to boot. It gets to the “Ultimate Edition” splash screen and the loading bar stops at about a fifth of the way and the whole system just freezes. I don't know what to make of it.

This could be a routine disk check happening in the background (maybe?), and can take some time to complete, 5 - 10min on some machines. There should be a message on the Splash screen when this happens, but on some systems, you may not see it. If this is the case, press the Esc key to terminate the disk check and it should progress loading normally. Or simply wait.

Cheers.

[tchk]

in regards to failing to load at splash screen sometimes i have same problem
so when she boots i hit escape to enter grub menu
run recovery
clean system
fix broken packages
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
file system check
continue boot
almost always any 1 of these things or some combination of them and it goes back to normal
as far as movies go does the reboot happen with fresh install or after you've installed other programs? sometimes i use vlc
as far as the updates go just uncheck the update thats screwing you or tell the pc to only do security updates and you choose which hardware and software updates you want to do

and for the head phone scenario i don't recommend plugging or unplugging any hardware during boot time just wait till it's done booting or do it before it boots
if you cant't get pc to respond you could try pressing control-alt f2
login
sudo killall gdm
sudo killall kdm
sudo gdm or sudo kdm to restart your desktop
and control-alt f7
will pull you out of terminal
also if you hit control alt f2
login as root
you can type "reboot"
or worse comes to worse you can hold power button down for 5 secs to force it to turn off
i hope you have some luck post back and let me know if any of this helps