Hi guys,

I have had a problem with Edgy since it was installed. I have nvidia drivers installed (non-free, beta) but I'm 99.9% positive that this problem existed prior to installing these drivers. I have Suse 10 installed as well as Windows 2k and never get this problem with either of those.

The symptoms are as follows: the machine boots fine and the screen goes blank as it does just before displaying the nvidia splash screen. Some of the time it will then continues as normal and displays the login manager (kde) but about 50% of the time the screen stays blank apart from an unblinking cursor in the top-left of the screen. When this happens, the machine is frozen and will not respond to any key presses. I have left it like this a few times to see if it will continue, but it doesn't. My only alternative is to reset or turn off. The machine will always boot properly the next time.

My first thought is that X is to blame but cannot see anything obvious (to me) in the logs.

Does anyone have any ideas of what could be causing this or where I can look for errors?

Thanks in advance.

look in /var/log/ for error logs, particularly the Xorg.log.
If you can get a copy of that log after the machine hangs, it would be great.
If you must reboot after the hang, and if you have access to the boot: prompt when using your bootloader, enter init 3 after the name of the image you are loading, so X wont try to start when it boots.
Have you tried CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE after the hang, or switching to another console with CTRL-ALT-F6 or CTRA-ALT-F1.
It does sound like it is X related, but., not sure yet.
PS- if you can't un-hang Ubuntu, then boot SuSE and grab the ubuntu Xorg.log file so we can see it.

Thanks for your reply.

When it hangs, it hangs so that I can't restart X with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE or swap to another terminal: the keyboard is unresponsive. Anyway, I did as you suggested and booted into Suse immediately after a hang (now, why the hell didn't I think of that?!) and copied Xorg.0.log. I had a look at the log file and saw this at the end:

Backtrace:
0: /usr/bin/X(xf86SigHandler+0x81) [0x80c3971]
1: [0xffffe420]
2: /usr/bin/X [0x8109346]
3: /usr/bin/X [0x8158c54]
4: /usr/bin/X [0x815397e]
5: /usr/bin/X [0x81132e0]
6: /usr/bin/X [0x811ae95]
7: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libramdac.so [0xb7068b38]
8: /usr/bin/X [0x80cc621]
9: /usr/bin/X [0x80c3281]
10: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libextmod.so [0xb7c50e23]
11: /usr/bin/X [0x80d9b57]
12: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libextmod.so [0xb7c56a0c]
13: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/nvidia_drv.so [0xb711164c]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11. Server aborting

This looks to me like the pesky nvidia driver's causing the problem or possibly an X extension. I could swear that this occurred with the nv driver that ships with Ubuntu, but maybe I'm mistaken. There's something else I've learned that puzzles me: it only crashes as described above on the first boot into Ubuntu after powering up from cold. In other words, it'll reboot fine as many times as I want but if I power off and back on, it'll crash straight away.

I guess I'll try a different driver. What do you think?

OK, I'm not sure what one does with that backtrace information.. Someone else may know.
Try Googling for something like "X11 Caught Signal 11. Server aborting" and see what shows up.
Switch back to using the nv driver and thoroughly test the machine, and verify whether or not this problem exists with the old driver. If not, then it's related to the new driver almost certainly. If the problem does exist, well.. Let's deal with that when it gets here

hi, i had the same problem with my geforce 440 mx , the blank screen with blinking cursor. If you are having problem with the nvidia cards try adding this line to
/etc/modprobe.d/options

options nvidia NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0 NVreg_Mobile=1

if the above line doesnt work try adding

options nvidia NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0 NVreg_Mobile=4

Thanks, GrapefruiTgirl. I'll try using nv and post back.

Thanks for the advice, rameshg87, but I'm not getting a blinking cursor: it's fixed and unblinking. However, I'll give it a go if I get a chance.