Did you upgrade to Karmic before disabling restricted or 3rd party drivers?

[bswilson]

Well friends, if you (like me) went ahead and upgraded to Karmic but failed to disable any restricted or 3rd party drivers, you may encounter problems.

I have a home-built PC that has an nvidia GeForce 5500 AGP video card, and I use the restricted nvidia drivers. I forgot to disable them before I upgraded. I had downloaded the Alternate Installation ISO via bittorrent, so I was all prepared to skip the network install headaches.

The install went fine, but when I rebooted, my screen was flashing so violently that I could not even log in. The GUI logon screen wasn't even presented. Things were so whacky, my system wasn't even fully booting, so I couldn't SSH to it from another machine!

How I fixed this

Luckily, I had a bootable Knoppix CD. I was able to boot into Knoppix, mount my Karmic system's HDD as read/write, and go into etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the driver from nvidia to nv (the one that comes with Ubuntu). Once I did that, I was able to boot into Karmic with no problems.

[layingback]

Thanks for posting this! I needed it, when I too wasn't psychic enough to know to disable restricted drivers!

[ghicksrn]

I upgraded netbook remix on my Dell Mini 9 with the 3rd party Broadcom driver in use. I had no option since it was being used for my connection. It posed no problem for me. But as I said, I had no choice.

[nzo]

I did a clean install and when I activated restricted Nvidia driver and rebooted, I had same shaking screen w/no login. Unfortunately, I could not restart as it seems to have killed my mobo. Asus m2n32-sli deluxe with 7600gt cards in sli. Probably should have stuck w/9.04 for a while.

[joplass]

Upgrade should automatically disable 3rd party software. It did on mine. I will report back if there is trouble.

[wsxaz]

Is there a possibility to open /etc/x11/xorg.conf in the recovery mode? (text only)

EDIT: yes there is. Never mind.

[ratcheer]

Ok, I am booted to an old Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD. It also operates only in text mode. How do I find and mount the hard disk rw so I can edit the config? I have tried "sudo mount -nrw /dev/sda4" but it responds that /dev/sda4 cannot be found in /etc/fstab.

Or, alternatively, how do I boot to "recovery mode"? I assume that would be booting to the hard disk.

Thanks, Tim

[lapdog]

Upgrade should automatically disable 3rd party software. It did on mine. I will report back if there is trouble.

This seems reasonable. It should also notify the user that it is doing so.

[ratcheer]

Ok, I have my PC booted into GUI mode after booting in recovery mode and editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, as described in the first post of this thread.

However, it is still not using the nVidia driver. How do I properly install the nVidia driver for 9.10 without getting it all fouled up, again. I seem to have the understanding that, with 9.10, I am no longer supposed to download the proprietart driver from nVidia's website and install it myself. What am I supposed to do, instead?

Thanks,
Tim

[ratcheer]

Ok, I have the video driver all fixed. I downloaded 190.42 from nVidia and installed it in the usual manner.

Tim