Yesterday, just before shutting down my System76 Bonobo Extreme laptop (Sager NP9380) to go to the Clinic I applied a number of updates to my Xubuntu 13.10 x86_64. When I restarted it at the Clinic I noticed that it was taking a very long time to boot Eventually I shut it down and restarted it, after which it booted normally. Grub is set to "quiet" so I can't say what it was hanging on.
Several hours later the screen suddenly became distorted. It appeared as if there was some RF interference that was causing "static." After puzzling about it I rebooted, which went fast as it usually does, and the video problem disappeared. The video is a GeForce GTX 750M, and I am using only the Intel video in the chip. When I got home I restarted the computer and it proceeded normally. However, my computer life was about to enter hell. I spent an hour updating the PLUG flyer, intending to print new ones for OSCON, only to discover that my network had lost the conection to the printer. It took an hour to solve the problem (I *hate* network issues!), and then I discovered that there is something wrong with the cyan in the printer. An hour later I gave up trying to fix it. We'll have to make do with the old flyers. I continued with other things at he computer, and as I was doing so I knocked a liter of soda directly into the keyboard. I dried it up as much as I could, and it seemed to be functioning normally, although occasionally a key would give me an unexpected result, like a shift-W would suddenly switch to another workspace. It continued to work until I went to bed. This morning the keyboard was mostly dead. Occasionally a key would do something, but always some bizarre result. I decided to reboot, and as it was shutting down the screen started flashing continually and the shutdown process was hung. Eventually I just hit the power button. When I rebooted I got the Grub menu instead of booting directly as it normally does (probably because of he abnormal shutdown). I could not progress because the keyboard was not working (Grub menu doesn't recognize the mouse). It occurred to me to borrow the USB keyboard from my desktop in order to continue booting, but it did not work. Eventually I decided to reboot again, and when I did so the keyboard from the desktop worked to get me into the BIOS; in other words, if the USB keyboard works as early as the BIOS, the failure to recognize the keyboard must be a problem somewhere in Grub or Ubuntu. I decided to boot to an Xubuntu 14.04 live DVD that I had lying here. While it booted the screen flashed continually, but eventually it finished booting. I have booted to this live DVD before and I never experienced the screen flashing. The keyboard from the desktop works fine in it, but the laptop keyboard is still dead. I called System76 just now and a replacement keyboard will cost probably $100. I have never replaced a laptop keyboard, but I suppose it is doable. What bothers me is that apparently there is some video issue as well as a keyboard issue, and the video issue started long before the keyboard went swimming. I'm going for a walk to clear my head. Meantime, any suggestions are welcome. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
