Ubuntu-Based LiveCD Won't Start Up Properly


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Hi all.

I recently purchased a book entitled Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (Second Edition) written by Jon Erickson because I'd like to build up my penetration-testing and programming skills. The book came with a LiveCD containing a customized distro that is based off of Ubuntu. It contains all the code and programs referenced in the text, and thus serves as a companion to the book. I'm using a Compaq Presario CQ50 laptop (I can post further hardware details if necessary), and for whatever reason, it isn't playing well with the distro. Upon turning my laptop on with the CD in the drive, I am brought to the boot options screen; no problems with that so far. I select the only bootable option (all the others involve memtest, booting from primary HDD, etc.), and the boot process begins. Originally, it would be halted just a few lines in, saying "Can't access tty; job control turned off". I did a bit of research and discovered that this error has multitudes of causes, and therefore has many solutions. I tried a few boot options and keystrokes, but none worked; finally, I stumbled across adding the boot option "all_generic_ide" on this forum somewhere. That worked--somewhat. It now goes most of the way through the boot process, but stops near the end, giving me the message:

Failed to start the X server (your graphical interface).  It is likely that it is not set up correctly.  Would you like to view the output to diagnose the problem? [Y/N]

Now, I've looked up a bit of *nix terminology, and I know X[11, right?] is the layer that handles graphical interfacing. Upon looking at the output of the error, I found the lines

(==)Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf"

(EE)No devices detected

After leaving that screen, I am shown the message "The X server is now disabled. Restart GDM when it is configured correctly." and then brought to a shell, which is logged in as reader@hacking and appears to be fully functioning. I can follow along with the book fairly well with just a shell, as most of it is code, but it would be helpful to have a graphical environment up and running. Also, I would think it would be mentioned in the book if an extra boot option and skating around errors was necessary to use the distro. I'm not quite brand new to *nix use, but I certainly don't have a great deal of experience with it. Is there anything I can do to make the distro work, or am I stuck with the full-screen shell?

Also--and I'm only sticking this in here because it may be related, and therefore useful--I'm having issues booting a few other distros as well. A straight Ubuntu LiveCD will boot fine, but a BackTrack 3 LiveCD (which I'd like to eventually install on a separate partition) stops and gives me an error about not being able to find the "BT3 data folder" (or something along those lines). If I add "all-generic-ide" to the boot options, it appears to boot further, but presents me with a black screen and a periodically blinking cursor. If I press CTRL+ALT+Del, I am briefly shown a framed shell login screen (which is unresponsive, I believe), and then my laptop shuts down. My apologies for the wall of text, but I want to make sure I'm not missing any crucial details. Any help with either of these distros is greatly appreciated!

I checked the X.Org wiki - and it gave the following description for the error you're getting:

  Quote
I keep getting the message: "no screens found"

This is a very general message telling you that something went wrong and there is no screen left which the server can successfully drive. Usually you'll see another error message describing what went wrong in more detail:

Message: "No devices detected"

You get an error message like:

(EE) No devices detected.

Fatal server error:

no screens found

It is very likely that your xorg.conf file doesn't contain the correct driver(s) for the chipset(s) in your system or that your chipset isn't supported by any of the drivers.

You can check for the detected devices in the log file (in most cases /var/log/Xorg.0.log) by looking for lines like:

(--) PCI:*(1:0:0) Neomagic Corporation NM2200 [MagicGraph 256AV] rev 32, Mem @ 0xfd000000/24, 0xfe800000/22, 0xfec00000/20

In this example the active video device (the one with the *) is a Neomagic NM2200 video chip. In order to get this chipset to work you'd have to use the neomagic driver.

If you are using a distribution you should rerun its configuration tool. If there is no such tool, or if it keeps configuring your Xserver wrong you may want to try xorgcfg, the graphical tool shipped with Xorg. You can also let the server generate a config file: as root just run X -configure.

Please note: If you appear to use the correct driver and you still keep getting this message it is very likely that your chipset isn't supported (yet). In this case you may try the vesa driver or - if this doesn't work - the vga driver. However both are entirely unaccellerated.

Here is a thread on the ubuntu forums for the same issue involving an nvidia card.

Use vi to edit the xorg.conf file to enable the vesa driver to test.

vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Hopefully this will help, if not maybe some more knowledgeable users will respond.

  On 15/08/2010 at 00:17, Phenom II said:

Sounds like it may be related to the HDD BIOS settings - I would try changing the SATA mode to IDE / AHCI / etc in the BIOS and see if that fixes it

Couldn't find a single thing about SATA mode in the BIOS settings. And believe me, I looked.

  On 14/08/2010 at 03:58, Behemoth said:

I checked the X.Org wiki - and it gave the following description for the error you're getting:

Here is a thread on the ubuntu forums for the same issue involving an nvidia card.

Use vi to edit the xorg.conf file to enable the vesa driver to test.

vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Hopefully this will help, if not maybe some more knowledgeable users will respond.

Well, this actually helped a lot. I didn't know what this command did, but I entered it in anyway (probably a good habit to get rid of. Or not). Opened up the config file; didn't change anything. Googled how to enable VESA driver; found out that it's enabled when you enter Safe Graphics Mode. I then realized that I'd never tried booting under safe graphics mode with the all_generic_ide boot option. Tried it, and sure enough...(drumroll please) it worked! The distro on the book's LiveCD successfully booted and ran in safe graphics mode, and BackTrack 3 (with all-generic-ide added; for some reason it hassles over the difference between underscores and hyphens) booted and ran off the LiveCD as well in safe graphics mode. For the record, the book's distro is based off of Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty). I guess the distros must have not been playing nice with my Nvidia card. Only question now is...can I make it automatic, or will I have to enter the commands every time it boots? Not a big deal if I have to, just curious. I'll probably end up installing BackTrack to another partition.

  On 15/08/2010 at 00:06, soldier1st said:

contact the person who wrote the book and included that distro and tell them your problem so they can help you resolve it.

This was my first idea. Unfortunately, it's rather hard to find contact info for Jon Erickson, and I suppose I'd have to go through the publisher (No Starch Press) to reach him. Ah well, null point now anyhow.

Thanks for all of your help!

  Quote
Only question now is...can I make it automatic, or will I have to enter the commands every time it boots? Not a big deal if I have to, just curious.

I'm not sure how you can run it in safe graphics mode every time it boots. Maybe you can edit xorg.conf to set it as default?

  On 20/08/2010 at 03:28, Behemoth said:

I'm not sure how you can run it in safe graphics mode every time it boots. Maybe you can edit xorg.conf to set it as default?

Can you do that for a LiveCD?

Anyway, I had no clue that BackTrack 4 had been released (for the record--awesome splash screen, more awesome startup music). Downloaded it, burned it to a DVD, ran it; not only does it run in safe graphics mode, but it also runs with the default boot options with no extra commands added. So...I'll probably install that to another partition soon; any recommendations as to how much space I should allocate for BackTrack 4? Anyway, I guess my next hurdle is to install it and put in the MadWiFi drivers so it will play nice with my Atheros card.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9498798&postcount=6

If that solves the issue and you want to keep the settings then edit /etc/grub to include this line

file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.lz i915.modeset=1

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