8.04 Install/Live: Single Monitor - OK, plug in second monitor - does not boot

[Chefbrenner]

Hi there,

I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.04 yesterday. I accidentally unplugged my 2nd monitor before installing and everything worked fine (on only one monitor of course, I thought that the 2nd one was not recognized.) Later, I saw the unplugged cable, connected it and did a reboot --> Both screens stayed black after the Ubuntu loading screen. If I unplugged the 2nd monitor, everything would work fine again. The same thing happens with the live CD, not only the installed version. (I guess I was really lucky that one of the screens had been unplugged during the first try.)

I'm using a (fairly new) NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT with two 19" TFTs (iiyama H481S and ViewSonic VP930, both connected via DVI) on an AMD64 platform.

I'm not new to Linux/Ubuntu so the first thing I did was looking at /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

The conf contains almost nothing, therefore I don't know where to set the display driver and similar settings (as in previous versions).

The log contains no error messages whatsoever and seems to recognize the graphics card and dual screen setup:

....
(II) NV: driver for NVIDIA chipsets: ... GeForce 9600 GT ...
...
(II) NV(0): Output VGA1 disconnected
(II) NV(0): Output DVI0 connected
(II) NV(0): Output VGA2 disconnected
(II) NV(0): Output DVI1 connected
(II) NV(0): Output DVI0 using initial mode 1280x1024
(II) NV(0): Output DVI1 using initial mode 1280x1024
...
(II) NV(0): Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA)
	Screen to screen bit blits
	Solid filled rectangles
	8x8 mono pattern filled rectangles
	Indirect CPU to Screen color expansion
	Solid Lines
	Scanline Image Writes
	Setting up tile and stipple cache:
		32 128x128 slots
		32 256x256 slots
		16 512x512 slots
(==) NV(0): Backing store disabled
(==) NV(0): Silken mouse enabled
(II) NV(0): DPMS enabled
[END OF LOG]

(See attached archive for full conf and log.)

I've used the custom compiled closed-source NVIDIA drivers with my previous Ubuntu installation (7.10) which worked fine but was a bit messy to set up (the shipped version did not support my card).

Anyone any ideas how to get this up and running quickly?

Regards,
Chefbrenner