ATI & Nvidia: no X, just blinking on 2.6.31 (Karmic 9.10)

[Jekshadow]

I recentally upgraded to 9.10, and on doing so, when I rebooted, it had me enter my encryption passphrase, it seemed to boot fine, until it got to where the login screen should be showing. It flickered a lot, and only showed the command line login screen. Whenever it was flickering it would not let me type. Could this be a problem with GDM trying to start but cant? When I rebooted to the 2.6.18 kernel, it worked perfectly.

[joewski]

Could this be a problem with GDM trying to start but cant? When I rebooted to the 2.6.18 kernel, it worked perfectly.

No unlikely, when you upgraded to 2.6.31 it seems that everything wasn't set up correctly, probably due to something you have set up before..

I would recommend downloading a live ISO first and check out the system from a live disk. That way you can see how approximately a clean install would behave.

If all is well, you need to clean install whichever distro works for you. If 9.10 works then go with it otherwise stick with 9.04.

To reinstall make a backup of your /home directory to another machine. When you restore there will be a few files that will need there permissions correctly set, otherwise you will get errors.

[Jekshadow]

I think its just the upgrade. I remember I had trouble with a similar setup and upgrading 8.10 -> 9.04. I'll just copy my /home directory and reinstall.

[markhadman]

I recentally upgraded to 9.10, and on doing so, when I rebooted, it had me enter my encryption passphrase, it seemed to boot fine, until it got to where the login screen should be showing. It flickered a lot, and only showed the command line login screen. Whenever it was flickering it would not let me type. Could this be a problem with GDM trying to start but cant? When I rebooted to the 2.6.18 kernel, it worked perfectly.

Ditto, you are not alone!

With kernel 2.6.31-14-generic, I got dropped to a flickering tty 1 login prompt. Ttys 1-6 (ctrl-alt-F1/F6) were all flickering, and the (otherwise blank) tty 7 seemed to intercept half of what I typed on the other ttys, making it damn near impossible to get my password right. It was however possible to login remotely through ssh and do 'sudo stop gdm', which ended the flickering. Rebooting into kernel 2.6.28-16-generic got me to a working gdm and beyond.


Possible hint:

Going back to the offending 2.6.31.-14-generic... I logged in again and did 'startx', which (amongst other errors, I think) gives

(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module!
(EE) NVIDIA(0):  *** Aborting ***

And come to think of it... I did see an error something like 'failed to build module NVIDIA... aborting' during the upgrade.

Can you repeat this, anyone? And can anyone shed any light?


Athlon 2400+ / A7N8X-X / 1.25Gb ram / NVidia Gforce4 MX440

[dspohn23]

I'm also seeing the same issue..... Dropping to a flickering shell.

[y.t]

Same here with a HP xw9400 with two Opteron 2389 and NVIDIA!

[macogw]

Can you folks file bugs using "ubuntu-bug xserver-xorg" ?

[y.t]

No, I'm not able to login because I loose the focus each time the screen is flackering - entering password is impossible

I also can't enter grub and choose another kernel. Very frustrating for the moment.

[JBAlaska]

Your Nvidia drivers have to be recompiled (installed) for the new kernel. Go to the Nvidia site, print the instructions (as you have to do this from a CLI), and follow the directions. you should be ok after the final restart of your X server.

[fasmike]

I just got the same thing. I got a new laptop today and couldn't wait to put 9.10 on it. I created a new run disk a couple hours ago to try it out and everything worked perfectly, so I went through with the clean install.

I get the same flickering:

Ubuntu 9.10 computername tty1

computername login:

command line login prompt everyone else is describing.

It looks like a message of some kind pops up below the Ubuntu symbol in the center of the screen just before I see the flickering login prompt, but it's much to fast for me to read it.