I bought a GeForce 6200 with 256MB of RAM for my computer. I installed the card, fired up Windows (since my wife’s side of the computer must ALWAYS be working) and installed the driver. Then I restarted, hopped into my BIOS and switched from the PCI integrated video to the AGP video. When I rebooted back into Windows, everything was great.
So, I rebooted and tried logging into Linux and it complained greatly about not being able to start up the X server and refused to let me do anything. I rebooted into safe mode and didn’t get much further even after downloading the Linux driver (while logged into Windows) and putting the driver installation file on the Linux drive (using the Ubuntu Live CD).
So, I did what anybody with a very recent installation of Linux and no saved files that I care about on the system would do…I reinstalled Ubuntu 7.0.4 on the drive. It repartitioned and completely reinstalled. I love that I have separated my Windows installation and Linux installation onto two different hard drives.
And just like magic everything worked. Once I was completely logged in I was able to use Synaptic to download the NVIDIA GLX package and get some of the eye candy to work.
While I had the case open, I also installed another 512MB of RAM to take the system up to 1GB. I detected the RAM and started running quicker and more confidently without any tweaking at all.
In retrospect, I think I learned an important lesson. Download and install the drivers before actually starting to use a video card or new piece of hardware. I’m not 100% sure, but I bet that would have made everything work right off the bat.
4 comments ↓
If you had simply run the command “sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg”, It would have reconfigured X for you and saved you the hassle of a reinstall.
I figured there was a nice easy way to do something like that, but I was busy doing chores so at the time it was easier and faster to reinstall.
Thanks for the command, though. I just looked it up and it looks like it will come in handy as I continue to add/remove programs and devices.
No problem. Be a little wary of it, though, it completely re-writes your xorg file, so any custom edits (dual monitors, 7-button mouse, etc) will be wiped out and have to be re-done.
So, just make sure you keep a backup of your old xorg file beforehand.
[…] That didn’t quite seem to get us all the way working so I tried a trick that chejrw recommended in a comment on another one of my posts that (s)he said would have fixed my NVIDIA problem without a complete reinstall. […]
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