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How can I fix my nvidia display problem in Ubuntu 9.10?

How can I fix my nvidia display problem in Ubuntu 9.10?

I had Ubuntu 9.04 working with nvidia display drivers, then I upgraded Ubuntu to 9.10. It boots to the desktop, the desktop looks great for a moment and then I get a screenful of pink and blue noise. How can I fix this? I've read that I should be able to drop out of the GUI with Ctrl-Alt-F1, but that doesn't work.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 389
Total answers/comments: 2
Guest [Entry]

"I got the help of a friend and here's what he ended up doing:
Booted into recovery shell.
Edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changed ""nvidia"" to ""vesa"". This allowed us to run the desktop GUI without getting the problem.
He then went to the list of available display drivers under the ""hardware drivers"" menu and we selected a previous version of the nvidia proprietary drivers (just previous to the latest). The package manager downloaded and installed these drivers.
We then changed ""vesa"" back to ""nvidia"" in xorg.conf, rebooted, and everything was good. The reason I couldn't drop out to a shell from the start was that the video problem seemed to kill the keyboard too. We also tried connecting an external monitor per DigitalRoss, but we never got anything to display. So the bottom line is that I'm not on the latest nvidia drivers, but at least I didn't have to downgrade anything else."
Guest [Entry]

"If there is a Fn key on your keyboard, you might want to try Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F1 to get to the text console. The F1 to F6 keys will get you to separate text consoles, and Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F7 will get you back to the GUI.

Check this thread on UbuntuForums if you want to mess with the NVidia VGA driver."