In a case such as Sergey’s, where the problem is caused by a faulty vfat rather than some weirdness on Ubuntu’s side, formatting the disk may be avoided by using fsck:
$ sudo fsck.vfat -r /dev/sdg1 # replace sdg1 with your usb drive partition device file
Aldo and uaneme, your issue looks more like bug #676828 (which I too have in 10.04).
According to my understanding and based on what Jonas wrote above and also [1], doing the freeze post-BIOS would be useless securitywise; it’s not even a workaround, as any malicious software then just inserts itself into the MBR. This really needs to be fixed at the BIOS level to be effective at all.
[1] http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2005-May/011688.html
I couldn’t, and neither could I with a 10.10 live, so it’s possibly something that’s changed going from 10.04 to 10.10. I also tried Chromium and Firefox 6 under 10.04; with Firefox 6 the issue persists, whereas with Chromium I can’t reproduce it. There’s of course a more serious bug underlying the browser, as no application issue should bring the entire system to its knees.
(I just realized I used amd64 live discs in the tests whereas the installed 10.04 is an x86 system. Perhaps it makes no difference but I’ll leave judging that to experts.)
I’ll gladly execute more tests if anyone has ideas how to narrow this down even more.
Thanks for your input Timothy, I’ll have to see if I can reproduce this using a 11.04 live disc.
Timothy, does your harware setup match? You’re using the internal Nvidia graphics and not an add-on card?
I just tested kernel 3.0.0, and although the issue went away, this didn’t reveal as much as it could have, because I had to run GDM in safe mode.
I have a desktop with two users, both of whom have Me TV set up. At some during configuration, one of the users has had her channels split among the channel pages so that each page is occupied by just one channel. This makes switching channels via the GUI a bit harder than it has to be, as you always first have to find the correct page for the desired channel.
I haven’t found a way to change the page each channel is showed on so that I could rearrange them into pages having more than one channel each.
The other user’s setup has multiple channels on each page as desired, so I figured copying me-tv.db from this user to the other would do the trick. But it turns out doing just that doesn’t copy the pages setup. So where is it stored? Alternatively, how can I rearrange the channels in pages?
I just reported Bug #840266 and thought I’d mention it here as it bears some resemblance to this one.