My upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04

April 24th, 2009

I’ve been using Ubuntu 8.10 for about 3 months now. This has been my first foray into using linux full time since I gave up on it becoming a desktop contender back in 2002 (Boy was I wrong!). After a few attempts at using the upgrade button and having it time out, I downloaded the ‘alternate’ cd and was successful in running the upgrade.

Everything was going along swimmingly until I rebooted. Once the splash screen went away, I was presented with a black screen with a no longer moving wheel cursor. The keyboard was unresponsive, but I could move the static cursor. It was then I remembered that this was the same behavior I had seen when I installed 8.10.

After searching for fixes, this is was did it for me:

  1. Boot into recover mode and drop into a root shell
  2. dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
  3. edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add a line to the devices section: Driver “vesa”
  4. reboot and you should be presented with the login screen

At this point, I tried to use the hardware manager to use the NVidia drivers but it didn’t seem to work. I ended up downloading the v180 driver from NVidia’s site and using their installer.

So far, everything else is going great.

For reference, my system specs are as follows: . Dell Precision T3400 . 8 Gig of ram . Quad Core . NVidia NVS 290 . Dual 250Gb sata drives

Posted by mcmoyer Filed in

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