WUBI and XP

stecleary

Hi all i have had a bit of an issue using wubi on my laptop here,
It installs and boots without a problem but it looks like my graphics card aint up to the job.
The laptop is about 10 years old id say
Laptop: Sony Vaio, 1gb ram NVIDIA geforce go 6400.

I'd have thought the graphics card is up to the job so just wondering if this is a common problem with using wubi or is it in fact my graphics card?


i have done a quick search but cant find anything

humbert

Need more specific information. Error messages, visual symptoms, we're not mind readers y'know!

stecleary

I'm not getting any error message

the screen looks like this sometimes


and other times it would be the normal ubuntu purple desktop with some black lines.

The track pad moves the courser around but it's very laggy.
As I said it installs and boots no problem sometimes I can log in but after that as a whole it is unresponsive

humbert

When it's working you could try(in a terminal):
the command dmesg to see kernel messages
or
have a look in /var/log/messages for system log messages.

More here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LinuxLogFiles

On Gentoo there is /var/log/Xorg.0.log but I don't know if it exists for Ubuntu. It is the log from the display system (X org).

Could be a monitor sync issue, i.e., a configuration problem but Ubuntu and modern Xorg is usually very good at automatic detection.

Hopefully there is something useful in the logs!


*Oh and I'd be shocked if any laptop with a dedicated graphics card was insufficient.

stecleary

when its working as soon as I try do anything the graphics go to mush again so cant really do anything with it. I have downloaded, un/reinstalled a few times just to make sure it wasn't the file.

Thats what has me thinking its a graphic card issue

humbert

Seems you can kill the X server with
Alt + PrtScn/SysReq + K

From here:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/65856/how-does-one-exit-the-x-server

Might allow you to check the logs before things go fubar.

stecleary

Think i may have worked out the issue, RAM??
This laptop only has 512mb of ram and Ubuntu need at least 512mb.

humbert

Assuming it created a swap partition it would just start 'thrashing the disk', i.e., using the harddisk when ram became full. Would slow down very badly but wouldn't cause a crash.

If you've got the patience and have no particular reason to us Ubuntu you could try another flavour of linux from a live cd (or even just try Ubuntu from the cd).

I'd still say the logs are your best bet to find a conclusive answer.

PrzemoF

OP,
can you switch to console (Alt_Ctrl+F1 F2 ..)?

If you have only 512MB of ram the system might be swapping itself to the death.

Post what you get after "free" command.

stecleary

got a live cd today and it runs fine, must just be something in the wubi file