gdm fails to load nvidia closed-source driver

[punzada]

On Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 AMD64 using included Nvidia closed-source driver 180.44 as provided by 'hardware drivers'
on a Compal JHL90 laptop (sold by ibuypower) with a p9500 processor and nvidia 9600m graphics card:

after a hard crash, and occasionally even after clean shutdowns when rebooting once gdm attempts to load, it attempts to use the nvidia driver showing the splash screen and then reverting to console three times in an obvious failed attempt to use the driver, followed by the errors:

(EE) Failed to load module "type1" (module does not exist, 0)
(EE) Failed to load module "freetype" (module does not exist, 0)

and it gives me the options to repair, troubleshoot, return to console.

I can temporarily work around this issue by exiting to console, shutting down gdm, running startx (at this point, the xserver loads as normal, shows driver splash screen and loads the desktop), removing the xorg config ( at /etc/X11/xorg.conf), running nvidia-settings as root and using it to re-write the xorg config and then shutting down from the xserver session through the gui menu provided in gnome.

Once this process is done I can restart gdm from the console and it will then load the driver properly and I can continue without issue as usual (until the next restart where it may load as normal, or may have to repeat the process to get back to a fully working desktop).

At the time of writing I am attaching Xorg.log showing the error occuring, If requested I can also attach my xorg.conf however it is simply a 'stock' one generated by nvidia-settings as said in the procedure above.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

that's a nvidia closed source driver issue

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I've posted a new version of the -nvidia driver to our xorg-edgers PPA,
would you mind testing it either on Jaunty or Karmic and see if it
resolves this bug?

Get nvidia-graphics-drivers-180 - 185.18.14 here:

  https://edge.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

[punzada (pang-optonline)]

Bryce, thank you for looking into this matter, after a clean install (jaunty 64) I tried the method of adding your ppa and installing that driver from the start. It appears to load into the system and load the driver without issue now, however ..

I've also noticed I am now experiencing this bug while attempting to 'compiz --replace &' from terminal -- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/316214 with same output as Daniel Dekovic commented with.

Compiz however still appears to function fine when enabling it through the gnome gui (system->preferences->appearance->visual effects->extra). This has turned into a horrible annoyance to a very minor inconvenience if this holds up so thanks for the good work :)

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Great good to hear. Guess we can close this bug since its issue is solved, and the other bug report already covers your remaining issue.