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

[Dave]

> On Thu, 12 May 2011 21:53:09 +0100 john davis<johnsemailaccount at gmail.com>  writ
> Subject: [Sussex] New Ubuntu (11.04) older PC (about 5 y.o.) and how
> 	to get	it sorted.
>
> 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.
You may want to look at the following link.  There has been a lot of 
talk / swearing about 11.04 as it is also having a problem with ATI as well.

I have heard that as long as you can get to the log-on screen, what you 
need to do is the the desktop option (on the bottom panel) to Ubuntu 
Classic.  Hence I have stuck with Linux Mint even though it is switching 
to Gnome 3 with it's next release.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTM2Mw

Dave P

-- 
Air blue? Damn it's gone deep purple!