Monday, November 5, 2007

Fixing long boot-time with black screen in Gutsy

After I installed Gutsy, I noticed that my the boot-time was considerably longer than other with Gutsy. We were talking a couple of minutes of waiting after I turned it on. So I checked around for a solution, and found one. Here is what you need to do:

  1. First we take backup of one of the files with this command in the terminal:
    # sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst.original
  2. Now in the terminal, run the following command:
    # sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf
  3. Edit the file's content to:
    # Usplash configuration file
    xres=1024
    yres=768
  4. Save it, exit the text editor, and run the following command:
    # sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
  5. Find this section in the text file:
    ## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the
    ## alternatives
    ## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
    # defoptions=quiet splash
  6. Add defoptions=vga=791 at the end, making the section look like this:
    ## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the
    ## alternatives
    ## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
    # defoptions=quiet splash
    defoptions=vga=791
  7. Save the file and exit the text editor.
  8. Now run the following command in the terminal(notice the ` are grave accents):
    # sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`
This should fix the boot screen, and also result in a much faster boot.

Credits to malcam for his post on ubuntuforums explaining this.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for this! I installed Ubuntu for the first time on my laptop today and was having this same problem. After following these steps I managed to get from a boot time of 4 minutes to a boot time of 15-20 seconds. It also fixed the boot image.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much. A Christmas miracle: not only fixed the black screen splash and DRAMATICALLY reduced startup time but also made the sound work at login. Thanks again

Paolo

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for best solutions
with black screen.

Anonymous said...

Thanks. It was helpful for me.

Unknown said...

Spent hours crawling the web for a solution to this - thanks for posting such usable instructions!

P said...

This issue has been bugging the heck out of me. Being fairly new to Linux, I needed clear instructions and you provided them. Thank you so much!

Anonymous said...

Thanks! This really helped!

Anonymous said...

Thank You Chief. It worked perfect. No more waiting for Ubuntu!

Miam said...

Great! I did not hoped that the problem can be solved so easy.