no screens found

jb1390 · 11-01-2005, 02:50 AM

just finished installing kubuntu (and ubuntu, have the same problem on both) on my girlfriends laptop. It seems to install just fine, but when it goes to boot for the first time, it says no screens found....it is a gateway laptop with an nvidia video card. I have used the same installation cd's on my laptop and my desktop at home. The laptop has an ati card, and the desktop has an nvidia, they both worked fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I'm still pretty new to this, so any detail would help. Thanks, Jeff

Simon Bridge · 11-01-2005, 04:25 AM

That is very odd ... will it work under the live CD?

jb1390 · 11-01-2005, 08:33 AM

no it does the same exact thing under the live cd as well.

Simon Bridge · 11-02-2005, 03:00 AM

OK - I had a look around. Basically this looks like a driver problem and you need to go in and edit your xorg.conf file. Set the video driver to "vesa" unless you happen to know the correct driver (nv I think) for your card is, in fact, installed. That should give you a gui to work from.

(Can you do a text-only boot?)

Here's a few references.
This is a very common problem - there are many references to it out there, however, you have to read between the lines a bit to make sence of the solutions.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/366530
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/374486
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-75705.html

I suspect you have accidentally "entered past" the installation screen where it asked you which video driver you want to use... easy to do as you don't normally get a choice.

jb1390 · 11-05-2005, 12:36 AM

ok, I got it up and running by putting vesa in as the driver. However, it only has a screen resolution of 800x600. In the xorg.conf file it has it listed correctly as 1024 by 768 at a depth of 16. I tried installing the nvidia drivers like explained in ubuntuguide, but it didn't appear to make any difference. Thanks for the help already, now at least it is possible to begin life windoze free.

Simon Bridge · 11-05-2005, 01:17 AM

Yeah, you should be able to change the resolutions in the gui.
Presumably you can force the resolution by simple removing the unwanted ones from xorg.conf

The ubuntu guide is out of date and rapidly depreciating. many things simply won't work for breezy or have an alternative. At the top of the guide there is a link to discussions about the guide, follow that for more information.