nVidia GE Force 6200 Turbo Cache video problems

[Paul Johnson]

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Ronnie <priswell at comcast.net> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I am using Ubuntu 8.10. I recently had to reinstall it. When I did, my
> desktop looks like blinking ribbons. I have a nVidia GE Force 6200 Turbo
> Cache video card. I can sign in (blind), but if I try to access the
> commandline by means of Ctrl-Alt-F3, the console does not scroll, so
> once the screen is filled  with text, I cannot see what is happening.
> Can someone please help? Although I do have some experience, I am still
> new to linux.
>
>
> --
> ~Ronnie

Neat! :)

When the pc starts, you see the "grub" program's prompt that chooses
the kernel version?  You can edit the start command to force the
system to go into a terminal mode (like Alt-ctrl-F1).  Presumably, the
problem  you are seeing is caused by the X driver being mismatched to
your system, so you need to avoid it. You need to start in "runlevel
3" somehow, you can Google to find out more.  Currently, your system
is trying to start in runlevel 5, with the graphical login, and that
is bad because your video driver is messed up.

Anyway, there are various ways, here's one I am pretty sure works.
>From memory, when grub prompts you with a kernel choice, hit the "e"
key to edit the startup sequence, arrow down to the long line with the
vmlinuz kernel command in it, go to the end and add the word "single"
(without quotes).  that causes "single user mode", a root shell will
be open.  I can't remember if Ubuntu will have you logged in as an
ordinary user or as root (yes, a root account does exist).

Hopefully, you get logged in and then

> cd /etc/X11
> vi xorg.conf

You may need sudo in front of that.

I'm assuming you have vi installed.  Maybe you don't, but you might
have the editor "nano".  Get the xorg.conf file open and scan down to
the place where it has "nvidia" and change that to "nv".  That will
tell the system to use the simpler nv driver that comes with X11,
rather than the commercial driver that is likely causing the trouble
you see.

If you exit from that file, then you could test the X11 settings by
the command "startx". That's how we used to start the graphical
interface before the GUI login thing was commonplace.

Don't try to debug video problems in runlevel 5, as you have seen, you
are screwed if there is trouble.

Now, if you get X11 to work when nv is the driver, you can consider
running the commercial Nvidia driver.  I've had good luck with the
newest version of the nvidia drivers that you can get from this
repository,

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates


 but I expect that if the ones in the base ubuntu repos were working
before for you, then i expect they will again.

HTH

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas