Ubuntu stuck in low resolution after UNinstalling / disabling NVidia drivers

Question

Tried the Nvidia driver, installed using the Additional Drivers panel. Didn't like it much; the CPU seemed to overheat more and the brightness controls stopped working. Also selecting a second display is a pain using that horrible NVidia settings thing.

So wanted to disabled it again.. problem is, UBuntu is then stuck in either 640x480 or 800x600 (second time I tried to install it back and then remove again).

How can I get this back the way it was? The original Ubuntu drivers worked just fine, allowing me to run Unity and games properly. I tried a xserver-xorg reconfigure but this didn't do anything. (No xorg.conf file either).

This is on a Lenovo Thinkpad T410i

Solution 1

Make sure your nouveau driver is not black-listed.

I had the same problem as you after installing the NVIDIA driver manually and removing it after not enjoying it.

You need to take a look in your /etc/modprobe.d folder. You may well find a file named something like "nvidia-installer-disable-nouveau.conf". You will need to be root to delete this so fire up a terminal and punch in:

sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-installer-disable-nouveau.conf

Obviously change this to whatever your file is called, if different. After that reboot and you should be good to go! I didn't use the restricted driver installer though, I downloaded the driver straight from NVIDIA so the file may be different or the lines:

blacklist nouveau

options nouveau modeset=0

May well be in a different file, so have a nosey around the modprobe.d folder.

Hope that helps.

Solution 2

i've removed nvidia drivers and had the same low resolution on one of monitors. surprisingly it helped to delete /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

Solution 3

if your laptop has another onboard vga, use it instead of nvidia card...

Use bumblebee to solve the problem... it will automatically diagnose and solve your probs.

steps: open terminat and type:

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

for more instructions https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/Upgrading-on-Ubuntu#wiki-install

Solution 4

I have a w510. unity(ubuntu 14.4) hangs intermittently.

I installed the bumblebee software and that made it worse.

Xorg would fail to start completely. I then tried a lot of things, installed nvidia-331, reinstalled the nouveau driver(which was the initial issue with the intermittent hangs).

The solution above worked for me. It turns out, the bumblebee stuff made a bumblebee.conf file in /etc/modprobe.d/ which black listed nouveau and nvidia drivers. I removed the file, rebooted. then installed nvidia-331, rebooted (a lightdm would prbably do the trick too) and all is well again. :)

cheers

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Comments

[Caesium]

Can you check if your xserver-xorg-video-nouveau package is still installed? This is what it should be using (if not the NVidia binary driver). dpkg -l xserver-xorg-video-nouveau should have a line at the end starting ii if it's installed.

[Han Cnx]

Thanks; this doesn't solve the problem. The Nouveau driver was still installed. To be sure I removed it using the --purge option and then installed it again. I get teh right resolution now but still I get random behavior of the display: flashes, flickering, random artifacts appearing and disappearing everywhere.

[Han Cnx]

Update: This is what I'm looking at currently; note the strange artifacts; these jump all over the place when I move a window. incm.info/images/screenshot1.png incm.info/images/screenshot2.png

[Lekensteyn]

possible duplicate of How can I remove nvidia drivers?

[Han Cnx]

Thanks; this doesn't solve the problem. The Nouveau driver was still installed. To be sure I removed it using the --purge option and then installed it again. I get teh right resolution now but still I get random behavior of the display: flashes, flickering, random artifacts appearing and disappearing everywhere.

[Han Cnx]

I added the repository and it shows in my /etc/apt/sources.d directory, but it cannot find the bumblebee or bumblebee-nvidia package.

[t-bltg]

yep, this worked: sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf~