I Broke the CloudBook

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!