problem with Xorg

[Sven Richter]

Hi Jimmy,

first of all, installing graphic drivers and
configuring x.org can drive you insane.
At least i got insane the first few times
i tried to, a long time ago :-)

So, if you dont have enough time
and you dont really need hardware acceleration
work with the normal setup,
this is what i would recommend to the "normal"
user.


On Thursday 05 July 2007 18:40:30 Jimmy Wu 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).
>
Which card is it exactly? 

> 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).
>
Hehe, i know that, googling and trying, and failing.
The normal way if youre going to fast at things.

> Then, the Restricted Drivers Manager showed a progressbar indicating that
> it was downloading and installing some packages.
> While it was doing that, my computer randomly restarted, and now it fails
> to boot properly.
> 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:
>
I am wondering how a screen can come up if there is
no x server running.

> Backtrace:
> 0:/usr/X11R6/bin/X(xf86SigHandler+0x81) [0x80c5d91]
> 1:[0xffffe420]
>
This is not very useful ;-)

> Fatal server error:
> Caught signal 4.  Server aborting.
>
Could you type in a console:
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep EE
and
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep WW
and send the output here to the list?

This way you will get more useful error messages.

>
> 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.
>
Puh, compiling programs and libraries is something
you should not do, if you really dont know what you do.


I can give you a short tutorial on installing the binary
driver from nvidia.
Go to nvidia.com, download the driver for linux.
Install linux-headers for your current kernel.
uname -r
should give:
2.6.20-16-generic

so you should install the headers for 2.6.20-16-generic with
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.20-16-generic
and then execute the nvidia installer with
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86...

This should compile a nvidia modue for your actual kernel,
which is automatically loaded

then type 
sudo nvidia-xconfig which generates a configuration file
for your X-server.
Then everything should run fine.

There is one disadvantage about the binary driver from
nvidia, after every kernel upgrade you have to recompile
the nvidia module meaning you have to restart the 
nvidia installer:
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86...

I heard that ubuntu has a smarter way to work.
It comes with its own nvidia drivers
nvidia-glx
and 
nvidia-glx-new
and with
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx...
it should do everything for you.

But i know nothing about that way cause my nvidia
card is not supported by these.

I always went fine with the binary drivers from nvidia
or ati.

Maybe a bit too much text, but like i said
graphic drivers are not that easy to handle ;-)


Greetings
Sven Richter