nvidia driver problems

[Daniel Stone]

On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 10:09:10PM -0500, Kristian Hermansen wrote:
> I am new to Ubuntu, but have been fooling around with Linux for years
> and just recently got over Gentoo recently.  Anyways, I am having a
> problem that I once had in Gentoo as well that may have something to do
> with the XFree configuration.  I am running a laptop that has a
> widescreen 1280x800 resolution that has problems with both the nv and
> nvidia drivers.  If I use the nv driver, whenever I try to switch to the
> terminal windows with ctrl-alt-fx I get a grabled screen with a weird
> refresh problem.  If I switch back to X with ctrl-alt-f7, everything
> gets back to normal.
> 
> I really want to use the nvidia driver instead because this seems to be
> a known issue with the nv driver on widescreen laptops.  The problem is
> that the nvidia driver only produces a blank screen on bootup!  I can
> hear the drum roll in Warty prompting me at the login screen, but I get
> nothing on the screen.  Just black.  This must be a common issue and I
> might be doing something stupid, however, I also ran into this with the
> latest nvidia drivers 66xx in Gentoo -- although 6111 worked just fine.
> Has anyone seen this screen blanking issue with the nvidia driver
> before, most likely occurring on widescreen laptops???  Thanks in
> advance...

It's probably an upstream nVidia bug, fixed in 6629 (which is available
in Hoary, our development tree).  Unfortunately there's nothing we can
do about these sort of bugs (including the one where the nv one doesn't
know much at all about LVDS panels), due to the binary-only nature of
the nVidia drivers.

Installing the 6629 driver from nvidia.com should work for you.