Dale's Random Ramblings ;-)

If you are like me and install the Nvidia Linux driver yourself, well this is the problem I have encountered a few days ago with Ubuntu 7.10 Beta / Release Candidate. It took me a little bit of hunting to work out what was going on as the logs were not saying what was going, but what I ended doing was starting X the old fashioned way from terminal with startx. Starting X this way was more revealing, that there was a conflict in the driver versions cause of the Ubuntu linux-restricted-modules and the Nvidia drivers I installed.

This is what I did to fix the conflict in drivers.

Switch to a usable terminal and login:

Ctrl + Alt + F2

Backup the linux-restricted-modules-common file

sudo cp /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common.backup

Edit linux-restricted-modules-common file:

sudo nano /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common

Add nv to the DISABLED_MODULES line

Here is an example of what my linux-restricted-modules-common file looks like:

# This file is sourced from the linux-restricted-modules-common init
# script and is used to disable the link-on-boot feature, one module
# at a time.  This can be useful if you want to use hand-compiled
# versions of one or more modules, but keep linux-restricted-modules
# installed on your system, or just to disable modules you don't use
# and speed up your boot process by a second or two.
#
# Use a space-separated list of modules you wish to not have linked
# on boot.  The following example shows a (condensed) list of all
# modules shipped in the linux-restricted-modules packages:
#
# DISABLED_MODULES="ath_hal fc fglrx ltm nv"
#
# Note that disabling "fc" disables all fcdsl drivers, "ltm" disables
# ltmodem and ltserial, and "nv" disables the three nvidia drivers.
# You can also name each module individually, if you prefer a subset.

DISABLED_MODULES="ath_hal fc fglrx ltm nv"

Now reboot:

sudo shutdown -r now

After the reboot you should be back to a working system.