Hi while trying different graphics drivers (choice of 3} I switched from
nouveau to an alternative while trying to get an inspection camera to work. This has resulted in the xserver being automatically stopped , the screens that follow ask if I would like it to be resolved .
Choose YES & the system very slowly lists a stack of files & finishes up by saying FATAL SERVER ERROR no screens found.
I have tried various suggestions that have been posted ,some of which give "command not found". obviously I can still log in to terminal but I am not familiar with the workings of terminal ,especially as I suffer from "fat finger syndrome"& am paranoid that I may make things worse.
The machine works ok when booted from the DVD.but I really dont want to do a new installation.
A step by step guide would be appreciated
Please can anyone help
Steamer

What distro is it? Did you install the drivers through some sort of distro specific wizard? I've never had any luck with those.

I'll assume ubuntu, since that's what the icon thing under your name says. Have you tried simply running:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

The first two commands update everything. The third one installs the default nouveau driver.

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Thanks for reading my post.Since my plea for help I have removed & purged the nvidia drivers
& the system has recovered. The puzzle is why was the offending driver available in driver manager?
Anyway Linux triumphs again, who needs W10 , no thanks.

You're welcome One of the reasons I switched from Ubuntu to Debian was their driver manager (at the time it was Jockey-gtk). It was terribly broken for me. I recommend doing it yourself from Synaptic when possible. It's usually just a matter of purging one package and installing another, as you've seen.

Just fyi, if you want even finer-grain control, using the command line driver tools isn't that bad (I actually find it fun). You can see loaded drivers by running lsmod, installed drivers are put in this directory:
ls /lib/modules/4.7.0-1-amd64/kernel/drivers/
(replacing 4.7.0-1-amd64 with the current kernel)
Then you can use modprobe to make it load the driver you want.

You can probably find more information about what went wrong with the other driver with
less /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old
or with journalctl if it's set to keep logs from multiple boots, I'm not sure what the default on Ubuntu is.

You may find even more fun doing it Gentoo way. You edit your VIDEO_CARDS variable, reconfigure and rebuild your kernel and rebuild the affected packages. Fun!

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Yeah, I tried Gentoo and I loved it, especially Portage. My laptop only has 1 ghz though, and it spent all of its time compiling chromium and gcc to stay updated. I'll probably go back to it someday when I have more time and some money to spend on a fancy CPU. Oh, the hours I'll waste profiling how much I can make the compiler use SIMD instructions.