Nvidia driver issue resurrected following Natty upgrade

[Khodeir]

Hello all,

So I upgraded to Natty last night. I hate myself for it... When I'm lucky, i get to ctrl+alt+F1 into another session and look at the log file.. only to find:

Fatal error: no screens found

Of course... I checked my xorg.conf ... it's the same one i was using with 10.10 and 10.04.

So i figured they probably did something to a driver i have installed and caused some compatibillity issues. So i moved my xorg.conf to my home folder and restarted.

Sure enough, this time i got all the way past the login screen. Of course, the resolution was horrible and you couldnt even access the menu without lagging, but its progress, i guess.

Now i'm stuck. I remember i had to do mess around with the xorg.conf and some nvidia-glx drivers the very first time i installed ubuntu on this PC. I don't remember what i did to get it set up though. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,
Khodeir

[sikander3786]

First try removing and re-installing your graphics drivers. Don't forget to reboot in between.

If that doesn't solve the issue, try reconfiguring your graphics.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Let us know how that goes.

[Khodeir]

Thanks for the quick reply, sikander.

I removed the nvidia drivers from the package manager and then ran:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
sudo nvidia-xconfig 
sudo reboot

It came back up and again, i didn't get past the Ubuntu loading screen. It seems that i only get past this screen if i don't have a xorg.conf file, i.e if i let it use default settings. What am i missing? :'(

[marek_online]

I had this problem, and it went away after I installed the right kernel headers. For whatever reason it looked like a DKMS issue - the building of the drivers was failing quietly.

I also uninstalled everything nvidia related and reinstalled nvidia-current.

[cigtoxdoc]

Please explain "right kernel headers"

Thank you,

John

[Khodeir]

I pretty much uninstalled anything nvidia related too (nvidia-settings, nvidia-common, nvidia-currrent and nouveau). I'm not sure what you mean when you say linux headers, but i'll try anything at this point.

Also, I tried a couple of "fixes" off the web although they were predominantly *old* fixes.. like for ubuntu 6.06. One of them said that the driver "nvidia" was not recognized and advised to change the xorg.conf to "nv" instead. That actually worked, but only to the extent that it brought me into the GUI with 640x480 resolution. I'm pretty sure that all that did was have the x-server ignore my graphics card. HOWEVER, this is the only way I've been able to boot into the GUI without removing the xorg.conf file completely, so.. hooray!

I'm missing a driver or something, right? What is it?

[Khodeir]

marek_online <-- This man is a genius.

I'm entirely unsure what reinstalling the headers means, but i know it worked!

Fix:
1. Get to a command prompt (either via root access in recovery mode or ctrl+alt+F1)
2.

sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-headers-'uname -r'
sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-image-'uname -r'
sudo apt-get install dkms (You probably have this one.. but just in case)

3. Reboot and enter another command prompt

sudo nvidia-xconfig

4. Reboot or restart x. (At this point you will be brought into the GUI . If you're happy with the resolution at this point, you dont need to continue.)

5. If your preferred resolution is still not available you can add it to your xorg.conf file maually. Just open it up in an editor, it is located in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. You will have to add the resolution to the "Monitor" and "Device" sections.. or at least, i had to. There is a very good guide on how to add custom resolutions here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=83973.

Thank you all for helping me out,
Khodeir

[marek_online]

Glad it worked for you Khodeir.

The kernel headers are bits of programming code that things such as drivers need to work with you particular kernel. Because there are so many different kernels out there many drivers aren't pre-compiled, but compile themselves as they are installed - and that's when they need the headers.

I was using the 2.6.38-8-pae kernel too, as it happens, so perhaps the problem lies in the headers of that kernel in particular not getting installed properly.

Anyway, happy everything's up and running!

[Khodeir]

One more thing, the OS seems to think my PC is a laptop because sometimes, instead of the GUI loading screen i get the startup script (if that's what you call it) and it always stops on "Checking battery state...". Just thought that was weird.