I just purchased a nvidia geforce fx 5200 graphics card and I am having some problems with it. When I plug my monitor into it and try to start my computer it hangs about a quarter of the way through. I am running Ubuntu 7.04 on a Dell Dimension 2300. I tried again but this time booting up in recovery mode. The time I got a message saying "Kernel Panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt". Does anyone have any suggestions?

Try booting into runlevel three. If that is successful, then go to runlevel 5.

Do you have graphics, or does the system crash?

If you don't have graphics, I'd suspect the graphics card is faulty.

If the system crashes, try running memtest from the Ubuntu install disk (at startup) to be sure you don't have a bad RAM chip.

You could also try booting from the Ubuntu CD instead of the hard drive installation. Does it boot or crash? Does it detect the graphics card? (which brings up a question: did you install the card after installing Ubuntu? if so, you may get lucky and find it's only a configuration issue. re-install may fix it).

Looks like an IRQ conflict to me. Can you try again, booting with noapic nolapic as boot options this time?

The card works fine on my windows partition, so I know that's not the problem. I tried booting up from live cd and had the same problem. I ran the memory test and everything is fine there. The graphics for the boot screen (The Ubuntu logo with the bar below it to indicate progress) come up but hangs about a quarter of the way in. I appreciate your suggestions jay, but I'm afraid I have no idea what you are talking about.

Boot and wait for GRUB to come on; immediately select the Ubuntu boot line and press E.
Then select the line that goes "kernel /vmlinuz etc." and press E again.
Append this to the line that now appears: noapic nolapic.
Press enter to confirm, then B to reboot.

If it helps, you should place the noapic nolapic in /boot/grub/menu.lst too after the Ubuntu kernel line; if you don't, you'll have to edit GRUB each time you reboot.

Thanks for the explanation. Unfortunetly, still no luck. I contacted Dell and they told me that they did not include the option to disable the onboard graphics on the Dimension 2300 (why I will never understand). I am going to continue to try to find a solution, but for now I think I am just going to yank out the video card. I can live with less than optimum resolution easier than I can live with windows. I gotta say though, that 19" widescreen monitor shure did look good plugged into that card.