[sclug] Disabling graphics card in Linux

[Matt Cox]

Hi,

I have a laptop which dual-boots Ubuntu with Windows Vista.  It has a
discrete Nvidia 8600M GS graphics card which are notorious for faults of
which mine is no exception.  The machine is only a couple of years old, but
out of warranty.  The symptom of this is the machine hard locks at boot at
the point it tries to initialise the graphics card.

I've found a way to get round it in Widows by booting to Safe Mode, which it
allows me to do as it only uses standard VGA, and disable the graphics card
in Device Manager.  Then I can boot Windows normally, albeit without any 3D
accleration.

Is there any way I can achieve the same thing with Linux?

Regards,

Matt.