Problem Installing NVidia Driver
 

Hi,
I have an existing Ubuntu installation. I got an extra graphic card from NVidia (the 550Ti). I managed to get it to display the GUI in a low resolution mode, but as you can understand I wanted to install the driver to get the normal screen resolution and other features. The trouble was that when I tried to run NVIDIA-Linux-x86-331.79.run (with Sudo) I got a message that I already had a GUI running, so I had better turn it off.
So I went to some forums and found some advice about turning off the graphics by rebooting with grub and let it boot in text mode. But now the display of characters on my screen are just gibberish if I use my Nvidia card (not with the original motherboard graphics hardware). I tried an older (CRT) screen with the Nvidia and nothing was displayed at all when using a VGA adapter.
I did manage to display text if I removed my Nvidia card, but then the installation of the Nvidia driver said it could not find the card and seems to have aborted.
So to summarize:
I can get my installation in text mode to run if I remove the NVidia card, but I can only get a degraded Graphics mode with the NVidia card.


Does anyone have any suggestions? This looks like a catch 22 situation.

I can't help you with the garbled text in text mode, but if you manage to start text mode with the nvidia card: The program to recognize hardware and suggest driver packages is (in ubuntu):

Try "nano", maybe it is installed.

or

Next time when doing experiments with grub: You can press "e" in grub to edit an entry just for once, without making the change permament. Press "e" again on the line you want to edit, edit it and press enter, press "b" to boot the changed entry.

Welcome to Linux Questions!

Ubuntu has a "find alternate drivers" thingy in the Admin or preferences section of the menus. If you pick this it will go and check and show you what's available. You click on the "recommended" NVidea one, it loads, you have to log out and in again to reset the X-server and you should be in business. :D You also end up with an NVidea set up utility which lets you configure various bits of your graphic set-up, double screens, etc.

Just because it's Linux doesn't mean you have to do everything using the CLI.

Play Bonny!

:hattip:

Thankyou for your help.
I have not managed to boot in text mode with the NVidia card so far, it's gibberish.
However I suppose I could try to launch the GUI (Gnome) and shut it down to get into text mode.
I found some information here

Right now I am in the middle of a long overdue backup of my files, in case I screw up!

If you can start the gui while your nvidia card is plugged in, there is no need to drop down to text mode. In this case, do what Soadyheid said: Use the version of jockey with a graphical user interface. Search for "Additional drivers", the icon looks like an expansion card. Do what the program suggests.

I thought you had already hosed your system too much to get to a gui, even better if that's not the case.

Ok, my backup was juge and I managed to get back to a low res GUI.
jockey-text and jockey-GTK found nothing.

Found nothing while you had the nvidia card built in? This is odd.

Please post the output of

and

Well, I have found a compromise: in Synaptic I typed Nvidia, and there are a number of drivers that are proposed. I chose NVidia-331, because the name seemed close to the one I wanted to install as a run file.
Now at least a gui displays when I run Linux, but the screen resolution is substandard: 1024x768 and the display parameters tool does not seem to let me do any better.

If you type "nvidia" in the desktops search, does it find a program with an nvidia logo, named "nVidia Settings" or "nVidia control" or "nVidia ....something"? This should tell you if the nvidia driver is running at all.

Yes, it finds NVidia X Server Settings.
Thankyou.
Not the most user-friendly gui I have ever seen,
I shall have to spend more than an hour in its documentation I guess.

I had a quick look at the driver settings documentation and saw nothing about screen resolution.

Ok the nvidia driver seems to be running, but with a lesser resolution than card and monitor are capable of. You can find out which resolutions are supported with the program "xrandr":

Time to look at the xorg.conf file. It should be located in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Make a backup first:

The file contains sections like these:

Look at the "Modes" line. Add the resolution you want to have at the front, or add the whole SubSection "Display" if it is not there. Do not change other things like Identifiers, these are just examples here.

More references:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution

That's very helpful indeed.
Unfortunately there is no xorg.conf file, but there is a xorg.conf.failsafe file
I could copy that to xorg.conf and add the lines you suggested. The explicit resolutions are not listed at all.
it looks like this

This means the nvidia driver package installation did not do its job correctly, because to use the nvidia driver you need at least the entry

in "Device".

Can you check if the nvidia kernel module is available to your kernel? To do so:

Hi Cepheus
I used the following xorg.conf file (I pasted it below).
The result was unsuccessful. in fact I got a message saying that none of the resolutions could work and display reverted to 640x480