Ubuntu Lucid: Services not starting

Since April I am using Ubuntu Lucid on my old laptop. Lucid was running perfectly without problems. And in the past I never had bigger problems with Ubuntu. So I decided to install Lucid on my new dual-core laptop, too. My first impression was OK. But after a few restarts I realized that some services like cups, ssh or even X randomly refused to start.

So what? Every-day services like printing, network login or graphical desktop do not start? Imagine you installed Lucid on all of your server machines with ssh not starting...

After a couple of hours searching my configuration, google and launchpad I found an open ticket with over 100 entries, that explained the reason: Upstart and/or plymouth have some problems with multi-core processors. Under certain circumstances of multi-processor concurrency the console is not writeable anymore and the requesting service does not start.

Workarounds

At this time there are three workarounds

1. Uncommenting "console output" from the *.conf scripts in /etc/init/ will help. It's no long-time way, cause after every update of upstart you have to do this again. You can use this short version, derived from the ticket:

user@linux:~$ sudo su -
user@linux:~$ for file in /etc/init/*.conf; do sed -i 's/^console output/\#console output/' $file; done

2. Updating upstart to a version from lucid-proposed repository. This does not work for all folks.
3. Removing plymouth boot splash screen. Especially on headless servers this seems to be a good option. You won't need splash screens for them ;-) And it seems to work even if the upstart update doesn't:

user@linux:~$ dpkg --force-depends -P plymouth

Now, Lucid is running perfectly again!