grub and knetworkmanager problems in Kubuntu Karmic
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I generally move from LTS to LTS releases of Ubuntu but reluctantly had to update my system to Karmic when my old HDD gave in. I also thought of trying out Kubuntu (KDE based) this time as I had heard that its doing a lot of interesting things (Akonadi/Nepomuk etc) and that with 4.3.1 it is stable as well. The installation went fine, all over within less than half an hour and then the problems started. Here are the 2 main issues that I faced along with their solutions, in the hope that if someone else runs into same issues does not have to waste time (and hair) on it 
1. Bootloader Issue: I dual boot my system along with Win XP (Needed for some office work) and generally install the bootloader onto a separate boot partition instead of overwriting the MBR. But this time when I did the same, I couldn’t boot (not even the grub menu). When I did this, the very helpful message that I got on restarting after installing kubuntu was “Error loading operating system”. I could still go back to my good windows install by setting the boot flag onto its partition. I mucked around with it a lot, trying to install grub2 again and found that actually it fails when I try to do the above (install on a partition). I also tried copying the boot sector from my /boot partition to C: and use ntldr to boot into linux but that also didn’t work. This lead me to believe that the same thing happened during my main installation and the installer failed to tell me anything about it. I tried then to install it on MBR but that also mucked up things and I couldn’t even get the error message, a cursor just kept blinking. Finally, the solution. I had to install kubuntu again and this time selected to overwrite MBR (this is default, BTW).
2. Wi-Fi Connection Issue: Second immediate issue was with knetworkmanager. It failed to start my wi-fi module (even after installing restricted drivers). I disabled and enabled wi-fi, so that brought some life to it (wi-fi led started glowing) but it still couldn’t scan for any access points. I could do the scan through command line and see my AP but my AP is WPA2 secured and I didn’t want to mess around with wpa-supplicant stuff. Solution: Installed Wicd. And it worked automagically.
Hope this helps someone else who faces the same issue. Looks like my idea of moving to kubuntu wasn’t a good one (especially because I had 2 lockups during the 1 hour I used it for in the wee hours of this morning). I’ll probably give it another week or so before taking the decision whether to move back to ubuntu or not.
One good thing to take away from this though: For the first time I could really appreciate the live CD installer that these linux distros give. As I could search about the various issues I had without having a second computer. But then again, it’s not that good as well because it means that so far I never had any installation issues at all…
© Shantanu Goel | grub and knetworkmanager problems in Kubuntu Karmic
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This post has 5 comments
December 8th, 2009
You are on the leading edge and you are on Kubuntu. I would not expect flawless behavior in this case. Stick with LTS (8.04 for now) if stability is your desire. Use the latest 9.10 only for testing and to experience new features.
I have been using the most current Ubuntu 9.10 on several systems for some time now, not KUbuntu. Ubuntu 9.10 has been working flawlessly for me both on desktop systems and laptop systems. Network manager under Gnome has not failed on me even once and I have used it for network switching between wired and wireless on live systems. Multi-boot has been working well also.
Perhaps try Ubuntu 9.10 (Gnome) and you may find that your problems vanish. Add any of the KDE apps you want to use on top of that. Leave the K Desktop out of the picture for now, at least until you get back to a LTS stable release level. How’s that for a plan?
December 10th, 2009
@zman: Well, I’d expect a stable behaviour from any point release of ubuntu\kubuntu, not just LTS, because it is not a “beta” or “RC”, it is supposed to be stable and not for testing. About moving to Ubuntu 9.10/gnome, well actually that is exactly what I did around 3-4 days after writing that post and it has been flawless ever since
December 9th, 2009
I dual boot my system along with Win XP (Needed for some office work)
Well, as long as you’re being apologetic about it Linux gestapo is gonna let you slide this time.
December 9th, 2009
Ummm, you just need to chroot and then install grub or lilo. Reinstalling the entire OS was a sort of… ummm well… I guess it’s like a MS Windows reflex:
1. reboot
2. reinstall
2 lockups man? How about doing all config via text files. That’s considered the norm where I come from. Anything else with a GUI and you should consider yourself lucky.
I’m no Linux evangelist. If you want point and click and tech support, stick with MS and Apple. Google seems to be headed there too.
Good luck!
December 10th, 2009
@sims: Reinstalling the OS was certainly not a “reflex”. I infact tried reinstalling grub (it is mentioned in the post as well) and infact I did a lot more of mucking around and only reinstalled as a last resort. If you do install kubuntu 9.10 like I did, you will realize that what you are suggesting will not work because this is a bug in grub 2 that it just doesn’t install on anything other than MBR (may have been fixed now) and installing grub over a grub 2 installation also has a lot of issues.
And I don’t know where you got the idea about config files and GUI, I am as comfortable as one can get with editing my configs by hand but I am not at all comfortable if my systems locks up doing simple tasks like launching a web browser, or a terminal. That is something I expect from an MS system, not linux and hence the grudge.
PS: Looks like you took my “moving to kubuntu” as moving from MS to linux but actually I was moving from “ubuntu to kubuntu”.
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