driver install means no picture after login!

[jay105]

hi guys

having read up on a previous problem i had with the screen resolutions, i decided to install my hidden nvidia graphics card driver through administration---->hardware drivers and selected the recommended driver for installation. having done this i was prompted to restart. having done this i proceeded to log in as usual, but then a blank screen with 'no signal' appears and wont go away.

how can i solve this?

cheers,

james

[waterhead]

Try this:

After booting to the blank screen, bring up a terminal using these keys:
Ctrl+Alt+F1

At the prompt, login. Then enter this command.

sudo nvidia-xconfig

Reboot, and see if it helped any.

sudo reboot

[jay105]

hi mate, thanks for the reply.

unfortunately it hasnt fixed the problem. any other ideas?

cheers

[D-cat]

Please show us the outputs of:

lspci -nn | grep -i vga

grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Thanks.

[jay105]

to the first command it shows

02.00.0 vga compatible controller [0300] : nVidia corporation Geforce 8200 [10de:0849] (rev a2)

it doesnt like the second half for some reason, maybe im inputting it wrong, im new to this afterall.

any advice?

cheers

[D-cat]

Note that Linux is case sensitive... that's a capitol "X" in "/X11/"

If you double check that and still blank, you're probably running a generic xorg.conf with no driver information.

Actually, can you just post the entire contents of /etc/X11/xorg.conf and of /var/log/Xorg.0.log ? Use "code" tags so we can easier read these files here.

I find it odd that the display would work to log in and then blank out, since the driver is loaded before the log-in. It may be some option we need to add or change, or some personal setting. I'm hoping the files give us a clue.

[jay105]

how silly of me, having used the capital "X" i get

driver            "keyboard"
driver             "mouse"
driver             "nvidia"

when using the /var/ code i get

 (WW) AllowEmptyInput is on, devices using drivers 'kbd', 'mouse' or 'vmmouse' will be disabled.
           X.Org Video Driver : 5.0
           X.Org XInput driver : 4.0
(II) Loading usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so
           Module class: X.Org Video Driver
(II) NVIDIA dlloader X Driver 180.44 Tue Mar 24 05:51:43 PST 2009
(II) NVIDIA Unified Driver for all Supported NVIDIA GPUs
           Module class: X.Org XInput driver 
           ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 4.0

like you say its very strange but it happened directly after installing the driver and rebooting the system for it to take effect.

cheers again

[D-cat]

What's strange is that you'd get a login screen, and it would go blank AFTER you log in. If the screen went blank as soon as X server loaded, it would make more sense for me. This seems to suggest a personal setting or maybe window manager related (are you using compiz?).

It's clear the nVidia driver is loading, and it is a supported GPU (nVidia's good for that).

Anyway, the above anomoly is why I'm asking for the whole conf and log, not just the grep'd output. Are you able to get a desktop via safe graphics mode at all? If not, we can try temporarily disabling the nvidia driver.

[jay105]

i have compiz installed but havent messed with it yet. funny thing is i do remember changing something to do with a window management option, but am fairly sure this was a few days before the problem occurred. can we consider this as a possible problem also and try and work around it?

how do i access a non-grep'd output for you?

thanks

[D-cat]

The files are probably too large to copy by hand from the command line, which is why I asked the question if you can get into X (or access the filesystem from a remote SSH login).

Basically, open the files in any text editor and do a copy n' paste. To view a file in the command line, use

less [filename]