Comment 11 for bug 220951

I finally solved this problem. Worked on intrepid, worked on Jaunty

In intrepid:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options
add the line:
options nvidia NVreg_UseVBios=0

in Jaunty things have changed, you wont find the options file
create a new .conf file in /etc/modprobe.d/ with just this line as content
options nvidia NVreg_UseVBios=0
i named it nvidia-fix.conf but the name doesn't really matter

Others reported they still had blank consoles until they set
vga=791
in the boot options in /boot/grub/menu.lst