Blank screen after booting (details in post)

[CeejRab]

ok looking pretty interesting, thanks for pasting that. I understand its slow switching back and forth from live CD. Do you have a tablet, smartphone, or different computer you could use the forums from? I feel bad for you switching back and forth!

[linuxnovice]

I have my laptop, but for stuff like pasting my xorg.conf file it is much easier for me to boot into liveCD and mount my SSD and just copy and paste it to the post rather than seeing and typing it through my laptop! Its fine really, I just want to get this damn thing to work after having spent yesterday fully putting this awesome system together.

In your commands, waht is the second line last two packages? I think theres a type there because I am getting an error of not being able to find xerver-xorg-core.

[CeejRab]

If youre referring to this:

sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*
sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
sudo update-alternatives --remove gl_conf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf

im not sure exactly, it looks fine to me but i didnt type it up its on a forum for the same issue youre having.

I think ive narrowed down the problem... Im lead to believe you need to do a nomodset, ill get right back to you with how to do that in just a moment.

[linuxnovice]

Actually I have tried nomodset as well. If you check my first post, I link to a website from where I got the information in number 2 of the things I tried. Although I have not tried that since the reinstall.

[CeejRab]

oh ok sorry i didnt notice that. If you do want to retry it, heres something i found regarding the nomodset:

Reboot and keep your finger on the “SHIFT” key till you get the grub menu. Highlight the first entry and replace “quiet splash” with “nomodeset” . Hit CTRL + X to continue booting. Once logged in install the latest Graphics drivers. System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers

Did you attempt to purge the NVIDIA drivers? Im seeing some people had success with that approach...

[linuxnovice]

oh ok sorry i didnt notice that. If you do want to retry it, heres something i found regarding the nomodset:

Reboot and keep your finger on the “SHIFT” key till you get the grub menu. Highlight the first entry and replace “quiet splash” with “nomodeset” . Hit CTRL + X to continue booting. Once logged in install the latest Graphics drivers. System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers

I will try that in a bit. But afte running your commands we have a progress! It's still not working, however instead of a blank screen after selecting Ubuntu 12.04 from the grub menu, I am getting this:

[ 7.742599] nouveau E[ PGRAPH][0000:01:00:0] ROP0 ch 1 [0x000007fc92] 0x80000000 0xB0000001

and 3 more lines like that on both my monitors. So we have something different now. I will try the nomodeset and report what happends along with my new xorg.conf which I'm guessing would have been generated after running those commands.

[CeejRab]

Hey thats a step! not sure if its forward or backward, but, its a step! lol

[linuxnovice]

OK! definetly progressing here! After I did the nomodeset I am able to get a shell with login name and I am able to login into my account in shell. However, when I run startx I get an error. Its too big to post here but the main is Fatal server error: no screans found. I am attempting to solve this now by the instructions here.

[CeejRab]

Awesome! I think that video tutorial should fix it, hopefully. If not i have some options ill post

*addendum*
Heres a link to the fatal error fix if you need something more than the video:
http://alexsleat.co.uk/2011/03/04/ho...-found-ubuntu/

[linuxnovice]

Hey,

So none of the other stuff really worked. I was able to get a GUI just once and login but that's it. After I rebooted its the same story again. I got tired of it and decided to reinstall the whole thing once again to start over. So this is where I am at. I reinstalled Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64 on my SSD alongside Windows 7 and with a swap partition of 2GB. I rebooted the system and I didn't even try going the "quiet splash" version. I edited it (which is kind of a pain to do it everytime, is there a way to always have nomodeset instead of quite splash?) to nomodeset. My screen was filled with text but ended with a blank screen. The good part is I was able to switch tty and was able to login to a shell. I updated/upgraded everything, I did not however install any nvidia drivers. Right now if I run startx from tty1 I get this error:

Fatal server error:
Server is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again.

I remove the lock and ran startx again, but gave me a similar error:

Fatal server error:
Cannot establish any listening sockets - Make sure an X server isn't already runnnig.

So this is where I am at, I am not sure how to proceed. Do I install the nvidia driver from the nvidia website? Really I am completely lost and hoping someone could shed some light as to why a brand new system with a fresh install from a liveCD which WORKS is not able to login to the desktop.

Thanks.