Ubuntu starts, desktop won't load.

**nowhere@cox.net** · December 2nd, 2008

Hey guys,

I have a quirky nvidia card (Geforce 7800 GT) that Ubuntu just doesn't like. It seems the open source nvidia driver just won't load on this card. You can try a couple things I did. The trick is to get a generic driver running at initial start up.

First question is does the live CD start ok? If so boot it up. If not and you have another machine on your network you should be able to ssh into the problem machine. Edit your xorg.conf file.

Code:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

In the device section change the driver line to driver "vesa"

Code:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Driver	        "vesa"
EndSection

Save and reboot. This should get you running graphically but not with the nvidia drivers so no 3D. Now you should be able to run the Hardware Drivers from the System menu and install the recommended driver. Pay attention: if your driver installed successfully, then the little grey light next to the driver should turn into a circular arrow indicating a reboot is needed. If it doesn't then it didn't install. This is the only indication of success.

If you didn't get the reboot indicator, open a terminal and try it via apt.

Code:

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-glx-177 (or your version)
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-177

You should pay attention to see if there are any errors and post them for further help. You may have to install a lower version, remove it and install the higher version to get it to show any errors. I did. Mine complained about kernel headers missing because the apt-get install ubuntu-desktop on top of ubuntu server gives troubles with generic headers vs. server headers. If you have this problem I can help more getting you running.

Hope this gets you further along!

**Guyon** · December 7th, 2008

Thanks nowhere@cox.net, I found instructions similar to yours in an Ubuntu book. This is what I did.

Put in the Live CD and started, and on the main menu that asks what you want to do, I pressed F6, and deleted "quiet splash --" from the boot options line. Next, I pressed F4 to go into Safe Graphics Mode so that I could use VESA graphics drivers. It worked fine and I did the installation, however now I ran into a separate issue.

I restarted and I chose Ubuntu 8.10 from the OS list. Maybe 5 seconds after hitting this, an error came up as shown:

Code:

Boot from (hd1,0) ext3   D829242f-5a86-4e8b-8945-021766b87d78
Starting up . . .
[        0.760144] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)