[SOLVED] Display screwed up because of NVIDIA drivers. Need to restore to default.

[sotvomike]

Ok, here's the deal. I have an HP Media Center 8120m that came with something caled an NVIDIA Unified Graphics card. I've been using Ubuntu on this computer for more than a year and when I started I activated the drivers that came with the distro and it didn't work out and had to run on low resolution mode. Somehow I restored it back to using generic display drivers and it ran great on 1680x1050. But through the year I been seeing all the cool effects you can do with Compiz and want to do the same thing, but won't let me unless I install the driver for the card. So, last night I tried again (figured after a year and going from Intrepid to now Karmic, something would be fixed) and I ran the gamut of solutions. I installed the latest from the NVIDIA site using their installer, I went through Synaptic, uninstalling and reinstalling drivers, I used ENVY. When I open Hardware Drivers, the recommended driver (185) says "Another version of this driver is in use". Even before I installed the other version and activated the recommended one, I had this problem. All gave me the same errors when I restart: "You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run `nvidia-xconfig` as root), and restart the X server." When I open xorg.conf, this is what comes up:

# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig: version 1.0 (buildmeister@builder75) Fri Mar 12 01:42:27 PST 2010


Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "glx"
Disable "dri2"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

# generated from default
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "keyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

# generated from default
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Configured Video Device"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "nvidia-auto-select"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Needless to say, even with all of this, nothing is happening and I'm still running in low-res mode. I just give up and want to go back to my generic settings so I can get back to 1680x1050. I already tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg and that did nothing.

Any ideas?

[sotvomike]

Nevermind! Got it working!

[MikeTbob]

Please do tell us the solution, it may help other users in need. Thanks and Enjoy!

[sotvomike]

I found this on another forum and it worked perfectly for me. Funny that the whole problem was that there wasn't enough memory to initalize the card. Here is the whole post as found on the other forum:

So after far too long, I've stumbled upon the answer to my errors: I forgot that I have a TV tuner card installed. At startup, the memory that's used to get all of the devices setup for use was too small and my TV tuner card was using too much of it...to the point that my nVidia card wasn't getting initialized.

These are the steps that I had to use in order to get the video card working for 9.10*:

*If you're reading this thread, I assume you've done the following and not installed any other drivers.
1) System->Administration->Hardware Drivers
2) Click on the 185 and then click activate
3) Reboot


New Steps:
Startup your system and either get to a console from the GRUB menu or boot to Ubuntu in low graphics mode and open a terminal once it's up. Once up, type the following command
Code:

sudo pico /etc/default/grub

Once inside of the file, search for this line
Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

right before the last ", put vmalloc=256M, so that the line looks like:
Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash vmalloc=256M"

Then, hit CTRL+O and ENTER, and then CTRL+X. This will bring you back to the terminal. At this point, we need the startup system to reconfigure itself, so we type the following command
Code:

sudo update-grub

Now, reboot the system

**NOTICE** If this doesn't work, try putting 192M instead of 256M. This has been reported to help as well.

What we've done is create an automatically booting proceedure that will allow us to use our video cards!