Please help with a problem starting X!

[FokkerCharlie]

Hello!

Last night I tried to manually upgrade my Nvidia driver to the latest version from their website, after previously using the 180-glx driver in the repos. Unfortunately, it's caused some problems.

Removing the old driver proceeded fine, without errors, and the Nvidia installer went smoothly. After rebooting, I am faced only with the text screen (after usplash, no GDM), and can log in fine. Then, I can switch to terminal 8 (ctrl+alt+f8), but the last message there refers to setting Advanced Power Management.

I tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, which returned:
xserver-xorg is broken or not fully installed.

I can't get connected to the network via the terminal here (iwlist scan finds the network, but I don't get a DCHP offer), so I can't reinstall it! Is it possible to download the packages to some other media or something? Aaaargh!

Please help! I'm hoping someone has a magic bullet for this....

Charlie

[dstew]

If you have Ubuntu 9.04, try the xfix command from a Recovery boot, or a command line. That creates a new xorg.conf file, which hopefully will get you a GUI.

[FokkerCharlie]

Thanks, dstew

That didn't work, sadly. Xfix returned 'Unknown command'.

I am downloading an image of the Ubuntu CD. Can anyone give me a sample line for me to insert in /etc/apt/sources.list so that I can reinstall xserver-xorg from it? The line isn't there at the moment. I'm using the 9.04 amd64 image.

Cheers!
Charlie

[gradinaruvasile]

Boot in recovery mode
Select root prompt

type
apt-get --reinstall install xserver-xorg
dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
reboot
cross fingers

[FokkerCharlie]

Hi gradinaruvasile

Thanks for your response. Reinstalling like that doesn't seem to be working for me, it seems that xserver-xorg is no longer installed!!!!!

I added the cdrom with apt-cdrom, did apt-get update, but when I try to install xserver-xorg, the messages all seem to refer to being unable to retrieve packages from the online repos.

Am I missing something?

Cheers
Charlie

[gradinaruvasile]

No networking at all?
Try the networking option on the menu...

If not working...
Can u find the deb package on the cd copy ? Copy it to the hard drive, and issue

cd /to/folder/ - the folder where the deb is
sudo dpkg -i *

[FokkerCharlie]

Hmmmm.

First off- the networking; I have not managed to get it to connect to the network here in the hotel that I am at via the CLI. DHClient requests many times, but gets no offers.

On the CD, I cannot find xserver-xorg package, in fact there are very few packages there! I will see if I can download from somewhere else...

Further input, if you have any, much appreciated!
Charlie

[gradinaruvasile]

Boot from the cd and download the packages...