After October rolls by, this shouldn’t be a problem as the updates to 10.04 LTS will fix the acpi problem. However, if you need Ubuntu to run on a twitchy laptop that crashed during bootup or fails to install at all, the Maverick Ubuntu Meerkat 10.10 beta is out now.

Cheatcodes
Cheatcodes are used to pass options to KNOPPIX to help with getting it working on difficult hardware. You type them into the boot screen and press enter/return. The format is “kernel option option option …”. Usually “knoppix” is the right selection for the “kernel”. You can type more than one …

You may find that grub is pretty useless when your menu.lst is missing or misconfigured. It’s not easy to figure out how to make grub tell you where the files are that you need. Here’s how to find what you need in order to boot, just using the grub bootloader.

I usually make my boot partition ext2 because it doesn’t stay mounted and doesn’t get written to unless i’m installing a new kernel or tweaking the options like vga=0×317 or whatever. But strangely enough, when I boot, grub sees the boot partition, grub.conf, and the kernel and loads with no problem. But when I try to mount /dev/sda1 from a shell it doesn’t seem to know what i’m talking about!

No matter what flavor of linux distribution you’re using, the default grub bootloader background image is probably pretty generic. Or, maybe you just want to personalize it. Since your system isn’t booted very far, your toolset is rather limited, so there are strict requirements for the image.