problem with Xorg

[Samuel Thurston, III]

Hi Jimmy,

On 7/5/07, Jimmy Wu <jimmywu013 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Something has gone wrong with my computer, and I'm not quite sure what
> I have Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), and I was trying to enable hardware
> acceleration for my graphics card (nvidia).
> After searching around the internet, I found one suggested method of doing
> so: go to Systems>Administration>Restricted Drivers
> So I did that, and I checked enable for the nvidia driver (it was the only
> one on the list).
> Then, the Restricted Drivers Manager showed a progressbar indicating that it
> was downloading and installing some packages.

Depending on your card, it may be that you need the legacy driver
which can be acquired through synaptic or (my preferred method) the
console;

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-legacy    (drop the '-legacy' part if
it's a newer card)
sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

> While it was doing that, my computer randomly restarted, and now it fails to
> boot properly.

you willl need to reboot, or at very least restart X in order to get
the acceleration going.

you can probably get x working again by issuing

sudo nvidia-glx-config disable
sudo shutdwon -r now                 (this will reboot the machine)

> A screen comes up that says could not load the X Window System (I have 7.2),
> and an option to show more info. If I hit enter on that, it displays some
> system info as well as the following:
>
> Backtrace:
> 0:/usr/X11R6/bin/X(xf86SigHandler+0x81) [0x80c5d91]
> 1:[0xffffe420]
>
> Fatal server error:
> Caught signal 4.  Server aborting.
>
>
> Does anyone know what happened?
> Also, will reinstalling X solve the problem, and if so, how do I go about
> doing that (from the wiki.x.org site, it seems I have to download a ton of
> .tar.gz files, unpack them, and build them myself).  I have very little
> experience compiling programs from scratch, and I was wondering if there was
> an easier way to do it.

again from the console you can just do

sudo apt-get --reinstall install xorg xserver-xorg