[sclug] Disabling graphics card in Linux

[Chris Couzens]

My friend's Nvidia laptop had a similar fate. On Windows Vista he
could see nothing, but he could hear things happening as they should.
We didn't try safe mode.

I gave him an Ubuntu disc and it gave him the option of running X in a
reduced mode. Perhaps someone here knows how to toggle this on in
other distributions.

Chris

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Matt Cox <spudgun79 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>