Immediately after the BIOS screen comes up, you will just for a second, see where it says in the upper left to ‘press Esc’ for more options. This is your hidden GRUB (boot) menu, press Esc and then select the third line down. This will allow you to boot into the kernel you were using previously.

Once you manage to get back into your Ubuntu PC, you will be feeling a lot better. You have your important data backed up and of course, you can now take steps to put this other kernel out to pasture. First, open up a terminal window and type the following to figure out which kernel you are running now which is working for you.

uname -r

Your output should look something like this:

2.6.17-11-generic

If this is the case, then it stands to reason that 2.6.17-12 is the problem kernel. Knowing this, goto System, Administration and choose Synaptic. Do a search for linux-image.

Remembering that we like -11 and want to kill off the -12 kernel
(linux-image), you would look for two entries for this problem kernel.

-linux-image-2.6.17-12-386

and

-linux-image-2.6.17-12-generic

Watch the video for the rest… ;)

Do you have an Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Simply Mepis, Linspire/Freespire or PCLinuxOS related question? Perhaps you are just burnt out on writing on the walls with crayons? Whatever the comments may be, drop me a line, and you too can “Just Ask Matt”- Linux Edition!

[tags]Ubuntu, Linux, system76[/tags]