BigBananaMan
August 16th, 2009, 06:22 AM
It's strange how such a great OS has always been crippled by xorg which I've always had bad experiences with.
After my crappy Biostar mobo finally died I installed an Asus M4N82 to go with my two Nvidia 8800GT video cards (we'll just say I only have one since I'm not going to even touch SLI). The system is running on two drives in hardware RAID 0. The version of Ubuntu is 9.04.
The problem is that whenever I try to install Nvidia drivers, the display breaks and I must reinstall the OS (8 times in one night). I have tested this on my desktop as well as my Dell C840 laptop so it seems to be like this on 2/3 computers I've tested.
I installed the Nvidia drivers 173 and 180 from both the normal proprietary driver installer and envyng. I even tried manually installing the 185.18.31 drivers from Nvidia and allowing nvidia-configure to run. GDM appears to start but does nothing and startx displays the following:
primary device is not PCI
(EE) No devices detected.
Fatal server error:
no screens found
bla bla bla
ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log
giving up.
xinit: No such file or directory (errno2): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error
Installing through the normal proprietary driver installer does update the xorg.conf but it's very sparse:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
DefaultDepth 24
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
I recall there being a little more to xorg.conf like a "display" section and there was a lot more to the "screen" section.
Whenever I attempt to start the system after installing the driver through any method, after the splash screen it goes back to tty1 and I get the following: (the uuid was too long to type so I just replaced it with the variable [longnumber]
Starting up ...
Loading, Please wait...
no block devices found
no block devices found
no block devices found
no block devices found
19+0 records in
19+0 records out
kinit: name_to_dev_t(/dev/disk/by-uuid/[longnumber]) = dev(252,4)
kinit: trying to resume from /dev/disk/by-uuid/[longnumber]
kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot...
Ubuntu9.04 Monolity tty1
Monolith login:_
I cd into /dev/disk/by-uuid and what do I find? 3 numbers, one of which is the [longnumber]. This seems unrelated but since it only occurs when I install the drivers it most likely is associated in some way.
I have attempted xfix
attempted to roll back to original (blank) xorg.conf
attempted to roll back to previously made xorg.conf from nvidia-configure, sudo X -configure, and sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg. All of the xorg.conf files that were generated were very sparse compared to my previous install(8.04) I worked on this all through the night and tried many other fixes that I cannot remember until Google ran out of ideas.
Today I tried a couple last things. I installed the xorg.conf from a known good setup. This did nothing.
I tried completely removing the Nvidia drivers so I wouldn't have to reinstall the OS.
sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia-glx* nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-settings
sudo rm /etc/init.d/nvidia-*
sudo update-rc.d nvidia-kernel remove
No dice.
sudo rmmod nvidia && modprobe nvidia
ERROR: Module nvidia does not exist in /proc/modules
hmm, I may check that out later
I checked /var/log/Xorg.0.log and found the line "(EE) No devices detected." and figured this is because I have two cards in the system. I got this idea from the second link at the bottom of this post. I looked up the address of the two cards with
sudo lshw -businfo | grep -i display got the addresses 0000:04:00.0 and 0000:06:00.0 and manually inserted one at a time into the "device" section of xorg.conf
"PCI:0000:04:00.0" and of course since I'm still typing, that was fruitless as well.
I didn't expect it to work right off the bat as Ubuntu is usually buggy and you always need to fix something or other, usually the display but I always managed to do a patch work job to eventually get it to do what I want.
I couldn't find any real information to any of the symptoms and what I did find was solutions that worked for other people but not me.
A few of the pages I've looked at with similar problems are at the bottom if you're curious. I have not tried installing the third party nouveau drivers but they aren't really usable yet, don't support CUDA(something I'm specifically after), and will probably break the system anyway. The biggest setback is that I'm out of coffee, don't want to take more caffiene pills after what happened last time(actually I ground a half dozen of them up and mixed it with my coffee grounds, still don't want to touch those things again for a while). I should probably go sleepy time now.
I won't be throwing any more rocks at it anymore any time soon as I'm tired, so very tired. If you know what this could be or have seen it before, please let me know. Perhaps I forgot to do something important and it's staring me right in the face, jumping and shouting "down here stupid!" If else, I can wait to see if they fixed this in 9.10 this October or try another distro like arch or dare I try gentoo(eventually will try it out anyway) when I have the time half way through the next year.
1.http://www.detector-pro.com/2009/04/how-to-install-nvidia-linux-display.html His problem was similar but would hang on "checking battery state" and I'm only using one monitor unlike him so changing the way my monitors are configured won't help.
2.https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia The troubleshooting section seemingly had the solution to my problem but as with anything, there can be 101 different things causing the same symptom.
3. www.iforgottherest.com Yeah I don't really remember the rest of the places I went. Just google the problem, pick all the pages that seem to apply, and those are probably the ones I checked.
After my crappy Biostar mobo finally died I installed an Asus M4N82 to go with my two Nvidia 8800GT video cards (we'll just say I only have one since I'm not going to even touch SLI). The system is running on two drives in hardware RAID 0. The version of Ubuntu is 9.04.
The problem is that whenever I try to install Nvidia drivers, the display breaks and I must reinstall the OS (8 times in one night). I have tested this on my desktop as well as my Dell C840 laptop so it seems to be like this on 2/3 computers I've tested.
I installed the Nvidia drivers 173 and 180 from both the normal proprietary driver installer and envyng. I even tried manually installing the 185.18.31 drivers from Nvidia and allowing nvidia-configure to run. GDM appears to start but does nothing and startx displays the following:
primary device is not PCI
(EE) No devices detected.
Fatal server error:
no screens found
bla bla bla
ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log
giving up.
xinit: No such file or directory (errno2): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error
Installing through the normal proprietary driver installer does update the xorg.conf but it's very sparse:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
DefaultDepth 24
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
I recall there being a little more to xorg.conf like a "display" section and there was a lot more to the "screen" section.
Whenever I attempt to start the system after installing the driver through any method, after the splash screen it goes back to tty1 and I get the following: (the uuid was too long to type so I just replaced it with the variable [longnumber]
Starting up ...
Loading, Please wait...
no block devices found
no block devices found
no block devices found
no block devices found
19+0 records in
19+0 records out
kinit: name_to_dev_t(/dev/disk/by-uuid/[longnumber]) = dev(252,4)
kinit: trying to resume from /dev/disk/by-uuid/[longnumber]
kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot...
Ubuntu9.04 Monolity tty1
Monolith login:_
I cd into /dev/disk/by-uuid and what do I find? 3 numbers, one of which is the [longnumber]. This seems unrelated but since it only occurs when I install the drivers it most likely is associated in some way.
I have attempted xfix
attempted to roll back to original (blank) xorg.conf
attempted to roll back to previously made xorg.conf from nvidia-configure, sudo X -configure, and sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg. All of the xorg.conf files that were generated were very sparse compared to my previous install(8.04) I worked on this all through the night and tried many other fixes that I cannot remember until Google ran out of ideas.
Today I tried a couple last things. I installed the xorg.conf from a known good setup. This did nothing.
I tried completely removing the Nvidia drivers so I wouldn't have to reinstall the OS.
sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia-glx* nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-settings
sudo rm /etc/init.d/nvidia-*
sudo update-rc.d nvidia-kernel remove
No dice.
sudo rmmod nvidia && modprobe nvidia
ERROR: Module nvidia does not exist in /proc/modules
hmm, I may check that out later
I checked /var/log/Xorg.0.log and found the line "(EE) No devices detected." and figured this is because I have two cards in the system. I got this idea from the second link at the bottom of this post. I looked up the address of the two cards with
sudo lshw -businfo | grep -i display got the addresses 0000:04:00.0 and 0000:06:00.0 and manually inserted one at a time into the "device" section of xorg.conf
"PCI:0000:04:00.0" and of course since I'm still typing, that was fruitless as well.
I didn't expect it to work right off the bat as Ubuntu is usually buggy and you always need to fix something or other, usually the display but I always managed to do a patch work job to eventually get it to do what I want.
I couldn't find any real information to any of the symptoms and what I did find was solutions that worked for other people but not me.
A few of the pages I've looked at with similar problems are at the bottom if you're curious. I have not tried installing the third party nouveau drivers but they aren't really usable yet, don't support CUDA(something I'm specifically after), and will probably break the system anyway. The biggest setback is that I'm out of coffee, don't want to take more caffiene pills after what happened last time(actually I ground a half dozen of them up and mixed it with my coffee grounds, still don't want to touch those things again for a while). I should probably go sleepy time now.
I won't be throwing any more rocks at it anymore any time soon as I'm tired, so very tired. If you know what this could be or have seen it before, please let me know. Perhaps I forgot to do something important and it's staring me right in the face, jumping and shouting "down here stupid!" If else, I can wait to see if they fixed this in 9.10 this October or try another distro like arch or dare I try gentoo(eventually will try it out anyway) when I have the time half way through the next year.
1.http://www.detector-pro.com/2009/04/how-to-install-nvidia-linux-display.html His problem was similar but would hang on "checking battery state" and I'm only using one monitor unlike him so changing the way my monitors are configured won't help.
2.https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia The troubleshooting section seemingly had the solution to my problem but as with anything, there can be 101 different things causing the same symptom.
3. www.iforgottherest.com Yeah I don't really remember the rest of the places I went. Just google the problem, pick all the pages that seem to apply, and those are probably the ones I checked.