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I Broke the CloudBook
February 15th, 2008 by Avram Piltch I’ve really stepped in it now, causing the CloudBook to suffer a Blue Screen of Death.
Mark, our Editor-in-Chief, gave me the CloudBook to play with for 2 hours while he works on other things. One of the first things I tried to do was to extend the desktop to a second monitor. In our mini-review, we hooked it up to a DVI monitor and managed to mirror the desktop at the CloudBook’s default 800×480 resolution, but I wanted to try extending the desktop and see if I could get a higher resolution.
I went into the Screens and Resolution setting and enabled the second monitor to act as an extension. I wish I had screen shots handy to show what I did, but well the reason why I can’t will become obvious. The OS then told me that I had to log off before the changes (enabling the second monitor to act as an extension) would work. I logged off, the computer rebooted, and then it proceded to give me an error message stating something like “Ubuntu is running in low graphics mode. Do you wish to continue?” I clicked Yes, unsure of what low graphics mode was.
The CloudBook then stuck itself in an endless loop of reboots. I shut it down and pulled the battery and started up again. I was given a text screen asking me for an “OEM Login” for Ubuntu 7.10 (notice that any reference to gOS rather than Ubuntu quickly disappears at the first sign of trouble).
I tried logging in using the username and password I had created during setup. Meanwhile, the screen kept blinking on and off as I was typing in the login information. Finally, I got a command prompt, but then seconds later, got this blue screen of death.
If I can even get back to the command prompt, I don’t know what to do. All I can say is that there should be a restore disk!
5 Responses to “I Broke the CloudBook”
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February 15th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I’m beginning to wonder this now: If you were indeed given a system different than the ones average consumers can purchase, do you intend to give it a thorough going-over and write it up too?
February 15th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
It is not broke.
Just your X11 configuration file hosed up.
Reboot in “single user mode” swap the backup copy of your X11 config file for the current config file.
At least, it should have left you a backup of your prior X11 config file(!).
February 15th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Can you boot up with the restore kernel? Hold down del right after you get past the bios, it should open up the grub menu (I think that’s the key)
February 15th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
I believe I am the first one to break this news:
Everex CloudBook Delayed Again?
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/02/15/everex-cloudbook-delayed-again/
February 17th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Wouh, really bad this screen configuration tool, if it brokes graphical server configuration…
But indeed, your system is not broken (even if it does not say so), if you get a command prompt, you can go back to your previous graphical server configuration (see something like /etc/X11/xorg.conf, to be replaced with something like /etc/X11/xorg.conf-080215)
And a BSOD is what it is, if there is only ununderstable text, with many error codes, here you can still interact with the system. What a good introduction to *nix systems maintenance!