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.
11:15, Thursday, July 10, 2008Nick F /
God bless you sir! I had this same problem in 8.04 until I read your post.
1:13, Saturday, February 28, 2009Frank /
THis didn’t help one bit. Just the same crap when I rebooted. The DISABLED_MODULES line had no entries at all, btw, just “”. So now it says “nv”. But it does no good.
10:33, Thursday, May 21, 2009Sidney /
This was killing me. Every reboot back to low graphics mode.
Thanks for posting this solution, you have saved my remaining hair.
4:41, Monday, August 24, 2009Michael /
Thank you very much! I had tried about a hundred other things to get my NVIDIA Geforce 7600 to display 1920×1200 in Ubuntu 8.04. This did the trick!