I have a problem with an older Laptop (Fujitsu Siemens LifeBook S6010, to be precise) and an Ubuntu (10.10, Xubuntu desktop) installation (fresh install).
During installation the graphics hardware was mis-detected and it now is completely impossible to boot the system into GUI. Any attempt to invoke graphics mode will freeze the machine.
Therefore I'd like to boot the machine into text mode to see if I can fix the graphics issue — probably material for another question, if and when I get there.
However, I was unsuccessful at telling GRUB (1.98) to not use any graphics, at all. I can get to the GRUB menu and edit one of the available boot configurations, but whatever I tried to express "text only", everything failed (i.e. machine still invokes graphics during boot and promptly becomes unusable).
I have no easy other way to get into the machine (it cannot not boot from CD or USB, for example). So: What do I need to do to tell GRUB at the boot menu to stop it from using any fancy stuff and get me to a text console?
firewire_core: created device fw0 ...
, and then a colorful display appears indicating a failed graphics mode. – Tomalak Nov 13 '10 at 17:43linux
line. If there's a UUID, no need to copy it out. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Nov 14 '10 at 10:57linux
line in the Grub menu. But since the UUID is painful to copy and irrelevant here, you don't need to copy it, just show us the rest. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Nov 14 '10 at 16:19linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic root=UUID=… ro single
for the "recovery mode" boot entry. In the meantime I've found out that graphics for this specific laptop model seems to be a general problem. – Tomalak Nov 16 '10 at 10:26