Comment 9 for bug 952574

Revision history for this message
Michelle Mark (topaz1968) wrote :

I would like to confirm that this problem also has affected me with my Nvidia GTX 460 card since Ubuntu 11.04 as well as just a couple weeks ago with 12.04 desktop 64 bit. I've come to accept that there are certain loops and hoops I have to jump through to complete an installation, however I"m afraid that this problem alone is going to be a huge hurdle in your accomplishing a resolution to your stated issue #1 as many people have Nvidia cards and if I weren't a quite advanced developer type user, along with quite stubborn, I would never have even installed the product at all.

I can confirm that when starting up with an installation disk on a system with an Nvidia GTX card the screen goes to black with a blinking cursor top left. If you quickly hit the F6 key then this avoids the black cursor blinking issue and allows you to see the menu with installation options. If you then also, after choosing English, press F6 and select nomodeset you can get the installation to complete, however upon system load the screen is just the pretty pink tones and then nothing, no log in, nothing. Choosing the safe mode option from grub to log into will allow a person to many error messages referring to nouveau. The only way I could find that can then successfully get you in to make changes is to:

Choose the option to go to a command prompt then
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
startx

Then, opening the additional drivers interface ensure I am using the nvidia driver and restart. I am not sure if I forgot anything in that last list of steps, its been a couple of weeks, but I believe that is it. I found that combination of answers by reading solutions posted on many places on the internet and taking some notes and trying things. I don't think you'll get alot of people reporting this problem though as most people who are able to solve it are likely going to be people like me who are good problem solvers and enjoy the challenge and have used ubuntu before. Anyone new and without that deeper understanding is likely to just throw the disk in the trash and wonder why anyone would every use that because it is just a black screen with a blinking cursor.