Comment 7 for bug 1214025

Ticket bump.

I'll echo/confirm lagre: This seems to be common with a range of nvidia GPU's. I've had it with the GT610, 210 and an old AGP Quadro across Ubuntu, Mint and ElementaryOS. The workaround for this is to edit the boot options, adding nomodeset e.g. "quiet splash --" becomes "nomodeset quiet splash --" or simply "nomodeset nosplash --"

This should get you up and working, the problem is once the install is complete, Xorg isn't guaranteed to figure it all out by itself upon reboot. For example, last night I installed ElementaryOS on a box with a GT610 using the nomodeset trick, and it rebooted to a garbled screen. I switched to another tty, which was also garbled, but at least interactive. I logged in, carefully typed `sudo nvidia-xconfig`, pressed Enter, then `sudo reboot` and everything was fine.

I'm not 100% sure how to make that a more straightforward fix, at the very least, nomodeset could be a "safe mode" (or possibly "nvidia safe mode") boot option. Beyond that, thinking out loud: perhaps there could be a detection for having booted with nomodeset (e.g. dmesg | grep BOOT_IMAGE), or specifically detecting certain nvidia GPU's, and if possible, chroot the HDD and run nvidia-xconfig before finally doing the post-install reboot.