[Sussex] New Ubuntu (11.04) older PC (about 5 y.o.) and how to get it sorted.

[john davis]

Wotcha List,

My great Aunts (she's 82) PC (Evesham AMD64) is about 5 years old.

Until recently, she was happily dual booting Ubuntu 10.04LTS and XP pro
(mainly using the Ubuntu).

So, she learned that there was a more up to date version available, I went
over there and did the dist-upgrade through the package manager (she does
the package updates herself, but isn't confident enough to do a
dist-upgrade).

Here is where we hit snags. Her graphics are nvidia based and as normal she
had the nvidia driver installed (and working fine).

When rebooting the new kernel (initially, the one that came with 10.10, but
since then they've released 11.04), the system seemed to fire up Ok, but
then we either get error text and no graphics (as was the case with 10.10,
we just get a white screen with gibberish characters with 11.04).

Now, with either upgrade, we can still start earlier kernel versions and get
the GUI fine.

I'm guessing, but given some of the hints from stuff mentioned in the error
dialogue, it seems it might be to do with incompatibility/lack of support
for her graphics card in the newer driver from Nvidia. The older kernel
versions still installed will boot and display fine with the 173 driver (an
older version) but having watched the install/upgrade dialogue, it seems
that something called "Nouveau" installs along with the latest (apparently)
version of the Nvidia driver.

As "matters Xorg" have progressed since I last had to meddle with stuff like
that, it's now rather over my head as to how I go about trying to revert the
system back to an older nvidia driver or even to the vesa driver so I can
see what I'm doing with installing an older nvidia driver graphically. I
certainly don't have the knowledge to do this via command line.

Can anyone point me in the right direction, or maybe post a link as to how I
might get round this ?

regards

John D.
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