TR Forums

Oh crap.

I was testing out Sabayon LiveCD on my destop and as it was shutting down it locked up and I had to hard reset. Since then I'm getting error messages during boot from Ubuntu 7.10 (installed on the HD) and the nvidia driver is enabled but not in use so it has me running on 'low graphics mode.' What the heck happened and how do I fix it.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the nvidia driver. No good. I tried reconfiguring xorg... again, no good. What can I do?

Nothing I throw at Ubuntu seems to want to work. But I reloaded the Sabayon disc and it recognizes my card and settings without fail, so maybe its Ubuntu that is the problem? What would cause the sudden refusal to recognize my card?

Alright,

I had to recompile the driver. For whatever reason it was completely gone.

Thanks anyway.

If you install the Nvidia driver manually, you'll have to recompile it every time your kernel is updated. Instead you should use the official Nvidia driver packages in the Ubuntu repositories. When you use packages, they will be automatically updated with your kernel updates and you don't have to compile anything.

Yup, what bitvector said.
There was a kernel update recently (1 or 2weeks ago) to fix a set of privilege escalation bugs. It may be that this was the first time you had rebooted after installing that update and so you thought it was the live CD that had messed with your install but it was just the timing of the reboot. I've done that sort of stuff a few times (update then not reboot till days later and hit an issue on some hand installed stuff).

I used Envy to compile the driver. Its the only one I could get to work properly. I tried the ones in the repositories (both open source and proprietary) and neither worked. The open source made it to the desktop without errors but wouldn't take the 1680x1050 aspect ratio (even after adding it to X11) -> the desktop was also shifted so that the right third of the screen was on the left side and a line (which should have been the edge of the screen) divided it from the other two-thirds on the other ( I should have taken a screenshot)

The proprietary driver brought me to the error message each boot, saying it was running in low graphics mode and couldn't find a screen. If I continued, my resolution was terrible (obviously). When I ran the xorg config it couldn't identify my hardware and wouldn't complete the set up. It just brought me back to the 800x600 desktop.

After using Envy, things worked fine but I had a flickering issue. I went into the Restricted Drivers tab and enabled the Nvidia driver and rebooted. Then reconfigured X so that the refresh was at 50 and my aspect ratio was right. Is there a better way to have done this?

Will this set up cause the same problem next time there is a major update?