delusionofgrandeur

This weekend, I went over to a friend’s house to install (or rather set up dual-boot) Ubuntu Edgy. This was mainly because his Athlon 64 system was noticably slower than my aged Athlon 32 in some real-world comparisons. (ie: turn all the widgets and tools on and test).

So, not really thinking I was in for an easy ride, I set out anyway. The first noticable issue was the complete lack of mouse pointer on the Live CD. “Uh-oh” I think. I the proceed to faf around trying the Alternate installer to see if that would result in a better situation. It doesn’t instead it gives me a refresh rate in the ludicrous speed range that the monitor can’t handle.

So, to cut a long story short, we identified the graphics card, namely one XFX 6800 PCI-E device, as being the culprit. The workaround was simple… Just install using the livecd, fly blind without the mousepointer during the install (it’s there and works, just isn’t drawn.), and perform an installation of the proprietary Nvidia driver. (Either the XFX card didn’t like the open nv driver or vice versa but it just wouldn’t work)

On first boot after installation, the screen goes into crazy mode as the excessive refresh is set.

Alt+F1

We’re now at a login promp, we login and issue:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-common

The Nvidia driver is now installed.

sudo nvidia-xconfig

Now x.org is configured to use the proprietary nvidia driver rather than the nv one.

Note that the output may become unreadable due to a presumably borked video mode, Alt+F2 and back to Alt+F1 resolves this.

Now we restart (you don’t have to but it’s the simplest way I know of at this stage).

sudo shutdown -r now

Hey presto! When we reboot, the system comes back up not only viewable with a relistic refresh rate but we even have our mousepointer to guide our way.

As a side note, the partitioning and dual-booting was easy. Perhaps too easy. Perhaps so easy we both sat there for 10 minutes scrutinizing the plain-language prompt to make sure we weren’t about to break something.

I even got a pizza dinner thrown in so I fully expect to be providing more support in that direction in future.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 1:00 am and is filed under Software / Hardware / DIY.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.