Melvin's blog

Hello everyone, I'm here to talk about what I like to call "The Busybox Screen of Death". This seems to be an Ubuntu (and derrivates) exclusive bug. It's a nasty bug that doesn't let you boot your OS. Some people, like me can boot their computers after typing "exit" after the prompt or by typing some "kernel parameter" such as "all_generic_ide", "irqpoll", "noapic", "nolapic" etc. Others aren't that lucky and just can't boot.

Take a look at this thread on the Ubuntu forums. Don't worry there only 32+ pages of posts (and counting) so you can read it in no time:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=765195

This bug is extremely critical because some people can boot the live disc normally but after they install the system they can't boot because of this.

In my case I have a n Acer Aspire 5050-5410, the live disc works just fine, but after instalation it just doesn't work, so I have to type exit or all_generic_ide in order to boot. I just type exit because is faster since the second "fix" is too darn slow.

There are many bug reports with similar problems in Launchpad:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/initramfs-tools/+bug/21759
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/initramfs-tools/+bug/32446
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/linux/+bug/290153
This is the bug I reported:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/293161

This bug is affecting too many people and can kill Ubuntu's growth. Think about the newbies, what will they think if the first screen they see is this prompt? Or after they install thir new system they see this?

This is a very mysterious bug because for what I've seen it only affects Ubuntu and it has many possibilities of why it happens. Some say it's hardware related, others Bios related, some kernels work, others don't.

I hope that this bug is fixed before Jaunty's release.