X won't start at boot with NVidia driver

[Ed Jabbour]

On Monday 04 February 2008 8:00 pm Ed Greshko wrote:
> Ed Jabbour wrote:
> > On Monday 04 February 2008 4:40 pm Sven Richter wrote:
> >> Am Montag 04 Februar 2008 19:43:19 schrieb Ed Jabbour:
> >>> Running kubuntu 7.10 on an HP laptop.  I downloaded the proper driver
> >>> from the Nvidia site and it installed with no error messages.  I ran
> >>> startx and no problems.  However, at a reboot, X would not start -
> >>> screen not found. I edited xorg.conf to load the vesa driver and got X.
> >>>  The NVidia driver will not run correctly until I delete a number of
> >>> libnvidia .so files and a few others from the /usr/lib directory.  It
> >>> then installs and startx works, but not at reboot.  The same process
> >>> over and over.

> When you have problems such as this the first place to look is
> /var/log/Xorg.0.log.  It will normally give you a good idea of what when
> wrong.  Not a great idea to delete files and such till you know the root
> cause.  But, maybe you looked in the log and just didn't post the errors...

OK.  Here's the latest iteration of my X problem.  At boot, X does not 
load.  "startx" generates this in Xorg.0.log:

EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module! Please ensure
(EE) NVIDIA(0):     that there is a supported NVIDIA GPU in this system, and
(EE) NVIDIA(0):     that the NVIDIA device files have been created properly.
(EE) NVIDIA(0):     Please consult the NVIDIA README for details.
(EE) NVIDIA(0):  *** Aborting 

The nvidia module is not getting loaded.  lsmod|grep nvidia returns nada.  I 
run the NVidia  169.09 package - no errors - and startx brings up X at proper 
resolution, etc.  lsmod|grep nvidia now:

nvidia               7822336  26
i2c_core               26112  1 nvidia
agpgart                35016  1 nvidia

nvidia is in /etc/modules and in "Restricted Modules" (KDE) is NVidia checked 
and marked "in use".

So it goes.