I did attempt to back up the wallet under File>Backup Wallet. All I got was a text file full of gibberish.
It should be a .dat file named to whatever you want like "BTC-wallet.dat" or something. If it wasn't then something is wrong.
If that is you could just copy the wallet.dat file to another directory.
I don't know where the blockchain is located in Ubuntu. Not a clue.
It's located in the same directory as the peers.dat file. The blkxxxx.dat (replace xxxx with the files names, like blkindex.dat, blk0001.dat) files contains the blockchain. Move them and then it will redownload the blockchain.
I didn't know that 11.10 ever was supported. It sucks and I hate it, but it's the best I can get in my price range.
It became unsupported in May this year. I however liked that distro! But you should really upgrade to at least 12.04 LTS!
Did you try everything in the thread I linked? The last thing posted especially:
I moved my db to a new drive and did a symbolic link and at first it worked then I stopped the bitcoind then started it again and it failed with...
ubuntu@cs3:~/.bitcoin$ bitcoin server starting
************************
EXCEPTION: 11DbException
Db::open: Invalid argument
bitcoin in AppInit()
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'DbException'
what(): Db::open: Invalid argument
Not sure whats going on.
I hit this exact same error running on an instance of Ubuntu 12.04. I then checked the debug.log file created in the .bitcoin/ directory and found:
LoadBlockIndex(): hashBestChain=00000000000001b38e93 height=197280
Verifying last 2500 blocks at level 1
ERROR: CheckBlock() : block timestamp too far in the future
LoadBlockIndex() : *** found bad block at 197280, hash=00000000000001b38e93f02be1f00ae3f39c4ab32dfb989154d38cfce2b29a4a
ERROR: CheckBlock() : block timestamp too far in the future
LoadBlockIndex() : *** found bad block at 197279, hash=0000000000000088246a0a90732f7fca77d0b0087c1997a91311e70a54b33da8
ERROR: CheckBlock() : block timestamp too far in the future
This further led me to discover that my server time was far off the correct time (by several hours!). So I then explicitly set the time via "date -s".
Example: sudo date -s "Tue Sep 4 22:37:51"
Rerunning the bitcoin server after doing that worked great (fixed the problem!).
Try that if you haven't already!