Friday, March 1, 2013

nvidia troubles - surprise!

So let's just say I wanted to play a game...

and that game required working nvidia drivers and not nouveau. Well, you would just think, that I could just install the nVidia drivers and they would work and all would be sweet. Well, no. After bricking my computer, and then ending up in some low resolution mode, and then with no unity, this is basically how i fixed it (though this was a step-wise process which may not be entirely accurate).

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get nvidia-current
sudo nvidia-xconfig
sudo reboot

this should get you to a low resolution OS. If you can't boot (black screen as happened to me a couple of times) then you can go into recovery mode, select the root shell prompt and then mount your OS r/w using:
 mount -o remount,rw /
and hopefully fix it with:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

So if you do get to a boot screen with limited resolution options, I found the solution here. Edit your xorg.conf (sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf from the command line) to change the following lines:
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    HorizSync       28.0 - 33.0 [make this range bigger, mine was 28-60]  
 VertRefresh     43.0 - 72.0 [change this range too]
           Option         "DPMS" [comment this out]

If you can find the factory values for your monitor that would be great, but I just changed mine randomly and it worked. But then I had no Unity, no top bar, no menus, no dash, nothing. I found the fix, here:


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia linux-headers-generic

and it worked! Now I can play guild wars 2 on my laptop (I am using crossover and I needed to go into regedit and edit memory size and glsl handles - instructions here.) It's still a bit glitchy, which it isn't on my main PC, but can't win at everything! I had the GW dat file stored on a shared partition, so I could just create a link in the folder I installed it to in crossover to that folder, which means I don't have two .dat files, one for windows, one for linux.