Nouveau in Ubuntu does not work on NVIDIA GeForce 8200M

[Danté]

The Nouveau driver for NVIDIA cards does NOT function on NVIDIA GeForce 8200M cards (also does not apparently work on the 8300)

This makes Ubuntu inoperable for many computers (including my laptop) because it simply cannot load. The only method of getting 10.04 and latter options to install is to upgrade from 9.10 AFTER installing the NVIDIA offical binary driver through Jockey.

A Linux guru I had look at my laptop told me Ubuntu was hard-coded to call upon Nouveau at startup, disabiling Nouveau stopped the system from loading entirely.

I would ask for an exception for the 8200 and 8300 during boot, if those cards are detected the old generic driver is called instead of Nouveau (thus allowing the user to install the NVIDIA binary driver should they so wish)

Below is a bug report in which it is detailed, but I'm unsure if it'll be completed in time for 10.10
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18286

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

I just tried out 10.10 alpha 2, the bug is still there;

Attached is a photo of the affected computer screen, the mouse can be moved but cannot click on anything. This was the furthest it got.

[kurt belgrave (trinikrono)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. I have classified this bug as a bug in xserver-xorg-video-nouveau.

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport, either via the appropriate application's "Help -> Report a Problem" menu or using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

I'd like to nominate this as a serious issue; this is effectively 'bricking' a good deal of computers (mostly laptops) and I've encountered 5 people (and that's just today!) who have the same card. As the unit is soldered straight to the motherboard it makes replacement is a damn sight tricky...

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

From the upstream bug it looks like this *should* work for GeForce 8200 and 8300 cards, both in 10.04 and in Maverick.

That said, laptop hardware is often weird; so while I expect that most 8200 cards work, it's entirely possible that we don't support some quirk of your laptop's 8200. If you're willing to invest a little time, it would be useful if you could grab some log files from the Maverick livecd. You should be able to get to a terminal by editing the boot options and adding “single”, and from there you'll be able to grab some logs. You can grab all the logs we want by running “apport-cli --save xorg-logs.crash xorg”, which will produce a file “xorg-logs.crash”. Attaching that to this bug would be useful.

Incidentally, your linux guru was wrong. We don't hardcode nouveau - we load it by default, then if that doesn't work, we fallback to the -nv driver (which doesn't support your card), then fallback to VESA. If disabling nouveau didn't result in a working system, I'd guess that -nv tried to start and failed.

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

Thank you Chris, I shall do that immediately!

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

Ok, (sorry for the delay) but I've been unable to get anywhere there; I load up a LiveUSB enviroment and all I get is the Ubuntu loading screen followed by the screen in that screenshot I took, I'm not ENTIRELY sure how to get into boot options on Ubuntu.

Could someone please just give a noob that little tidbit of knowledge? :) All my searches have resulted in reviews about Ubuntu's new loading screen or how to boot a Live enviroment. *sigh*

[kurt belgrave (trinikrono)]

Dante
Normally you should just be able to press escape during the grub loading, and from there you can edit the boot options.
Cheers

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

Right, I've been unable to get the logs, as the only enviroment I'm capable of getting is the root shell and despite my searching I can't find a command to transfer the xorg crash logs to a USB stick.

Oddly, I was sometimes able to boot into the LiveCD enviroment (with visual corruption affecting the lower half of the screen) but attempting to open any application, even the terminal, froze the system.

[kurt belgrave (trinikrono)]

Dante
Can you test this behavior in maverick and see if it has been sorted out?
Cheers

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

10.10 does not work, as a thick black line can be seen under the Ubuntu loading screen during bootup. However, if I go to the old menu at boot-up I can launch the Live environment, with the consequence of it becoming non-functional as soon as I start any application. Visual corruption can be seen in the same area as where the black line was during boot up.

Also, I am attempting to recover the xorg logs (after having found out how to transfer them from the live enviroment to my hard-drive, but sadly the tar.gz file is corrupted. I should figure it out by tomorrow though.

Thanks for your patience!

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

I'm pleased to report I have, after a life and death struggle with my computer, been able to get the logs. See attached :)

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

Bah! According to those logs everything appears to be working fine. They do indicate that you've got an external monitor plugged in to what the card believes is an HDMI port, though.

Do you have an external monitor plugged in? If so, could you try booting without it plugged in? If not, this could well be a part of the problem.

Secondly, it looks like vga16fb is loading for you; that has, in the past, interacted badly with nouveau. We've made some kernel changes that should prevent vga16fb from loading. If you test a more recent LiveCD you might find that this is fixed.

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

Right;

I did indeed have an external monitor; a TV (Sharp), but unplugging it has not changed the problems encountered with 10.04.

I've tried alpha 3 and daily live of 10.10, but there seems to be an error (Unknown keyword in configuration file) which appears to be a known problem; apparently it did not exist with alpha 2 nor 1, so I guess I'll have to wait and see what happens here before I can confirm this bug has been squished

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

I have tried the recent daily build with the updated usb-creator. (Thus fixing my eariler problem preventing me from testing)

However, It's still stuck :/

Screenshots;

1st:
http://ubuntuone.com/p/Ej8/

The above screenshot shows Ubuntu booting, a glow effect is visible (whilst on the current system it is not and is just bland colour) also notice the thick black line.

2nd:
http://ubuntuone.com/p/EjC/

The second screenshot shows what happens when the system is booted up; I can move the mouse, but all I have is that white box that does nothing. It's probably worth noting that when I get to that stage my CPU fan is going wild.

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

Aplogies, I forgot I had the TV plugged in through HDMI.

http://ubuntuone.com/p/Ejb/

I took this one after accessing Ubuntu the older menu way. Desktop login sound was heard and the mouse could be moved...on the boot screen.

http://ubuntuone.com/p/EjY/

This is what happens if I attempted to launch normally. Notice the two icons in the top right. It stayed like this for half an hour before I turned it off.

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

Right. After the few months I've been chased by this bug, the KDE forums were of great help to finding a solution;

Edit boot options and add "xforcevesa" to it. This will start Ubuntu in low graphics mode, which is carried across to the installation. The new driver is a bit of lost cause here, but the VESA driver will see you through.

I'm unsure about what information I could provide here for this bug; but I would ask for a stopgap measure; that the VESA driver is called for if my model graphics card is detected.

[Danté (dante-ashton)]

After some further reading in an attempt to actually get into Ubuntu, ticking 'nomodeset' in the boot options actually makes Ubuntu work, which I'm thrilled about! :D

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xserver-xorg-video-nouveau (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]