Have been trying off and on all day to get Ubuntu working on my Media Center. It’s not exactly that old a build, the motherboard dates back to 2006 and it’s running a 3.2ghz P4 but it kept freezing on the installation. Nothing I did would rectify the situation.

I was trying to install Ubuntu from a 4gb flash drive, but in the end I remembered that I installed Ubuntu onto another server 6+ months ago. I removed the drive from this server, put it into the Media Center and it booted straight in. Yet after 2 minutes, everything froze again. I rebooted and it happened again, and again….

I googled for ages and pulling info from several different places I found I could have an issue with ACPI. I looked into updating my motherboards BIOS, but (quite unbelievably) there has never been a BIOS update for it!

In the end, I fixed the problem by doing the following:

  • Powered the machine on
  • Pressed ‘ESC’ when ‘GRUB Loader’ prompt appeared
  • Highlighted the installation and pressed ‘e’ to edit – a list of commands is displayed
  • Highlighted the kernel boot command and added the following text to the end – ‘acpi=ht‘
  • Pressed enter and returned to the boot editor, pressed ‘b’ to boot.
  • The system then loaded with ACPI disabled and no further freezing!

This was only a temporary measure and needed to be done on every boot, so an edit of the actual boot file was required.

To do this …

  • I opened a terminal session
  • Typed the following command:  ‘sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst‘
  • Pressed enter
  • Scrolled down to same boot options the GRUB screen
  • Added ‘acpi=ht‘ to end
  • Gave CTRL+O to write the file
  • Rebooted
  • Sorted!

For info, the specs of the Media Center are as follows:

  • CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3ghz
  • RAM: 2gb DDR 400
  • MOBO: FIC P4M-915GDI-LF
  • GFX: Onboard gfx
  • HDD: 1 x 400gb IDE
  • Display: 32″ Samsung High Definition TV