On upgrade, X did not start because nvidia module is not available

[Steve Alexander]

Binary package hint: nvidia-common

I run the development version of Karmic on my 64 bit machine.

First thing this morning, my machine was running with nvidia accelerated graphics.

Later today I updated with apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade.

The upgrade appeared to go okay. I restarted the machine. It loaded up into a text console.

I logged in, and tried "startx". It failed. I looked in xorg.conf, and commented out the line saying to use a nvidia driver. After this, startx worked but with basic graphics (not accelerated).

I tried going to the Appearance Preferences menu and turning on accelerated graphics. It asked me if it's okay to download a driver and install it. I agreed to this, and something was downloaded and installed. A confusing message implied I should restart the machine to see accelerated graphics. I restarted, and was back in text mode with startx not starting.

"sudo modprobe nvidia" gives me the response "FATAL: Module nvidia not found."

I spoke with StevenK on #ubuntu-devel, and he asked me to file this bug.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Aug 25 12:50:10 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: nvidia-common 0.2.15
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-7.27-generic
SourcePackage: nvidia-common
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-7-generic x86_64

[Lane Lester (llester)]

I observed something similar in my first clean install of Karmic Alpha 5. My motherboard has an nVidia chipset. Karmic evidently saw it and installed the nvidia driver line in xorg.conf, but did not install the nvidia driver. X would not start until, like above, that line was removed.

Once X was going, I could install the nvidia proprietary driver and have full graphics capability.