Comment 13 for bug 940564

I just came across this report, and while I'm not having problems with black screens or failed shut-downs so much, I have a similar set-up to the original reporter: Nvidia 8400M GT, Core 2 Duo, and I've been having problems with the GPU failing to activate (see Bug #1009312). It seems to be happening at the actual kernel level very early in booting, not the nvidia drivers.

I'm seeing a lot of similarities in the patterns here though: problem seems to happen in cycles over multiple shutdowns, much better luck with the 64bit version of Ubuntu and the kernel (comment #6 above), having to revert to the VGA drivers (comment #12), some relation to power management. I don't think my report is an exact duplicate of this (and I think all kernel reports are supposed to be treated separately), but I would be interested if anyone here is seeing something similar to what I am. If anyone is, that could really help us narrow down what's going on.

And again, if you have a 64bit processor, you really might want to try moving to the 64bit build of Ubuntu; when I was on the PAE kernel, GPU problems were the norm, but since switching to the 64bit version, I've only had one bad session over at least 10 reboots.