Since using Hoary I have been completely unable to get the NVidia drivers installed and working. My machine is a Dell Inspiron 8100 (fairly old laptop) with a G-Force2 Go card. The NVidia drivers that were in the Warty repository worked *perfectly* on this machine. However, I'm now running a fresh install of Hoary and I'm having no luck at all.

The problem I get is that after installing the drivers a blank screen appears during system boot up (about when the gdm would usually load). No cursor or text is displayed, it's totally blank. The machine has effectively crashed since I can't get to any terminal (Ctrl+Alt 1-7 does nothing). The only thing I can do is hard-reset, load via grub into recovery mode and uninstall the driver again.

First I tried to install the drivers as described by UbuntuGuide from the repository. I've also downloaded the very latest drivers from NVidia's website and installed them instead. Both approaches have led to the problem above.

I thought initially that it might be a kernel problem (I've installed the 686 kernel) but I've now had this problem with both the 386 and 686 kernels so I don't believe it's due to that.

I've tried everything I know and can't get this to work. I'm even more bemused since the drivers worked so easily in Warty! Is there some way I can use the Warty drivers on Hoary?

Any help is *very* much appreciated.

Hey there, I too use Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary with an NVIDIA video card. What you need to do, and of course I have done this and it works for me, is that you need do the following:

1.Boot Ubuntu in recovery mode and then execute the following command as a root vi /etc/apt/sources.list and edit the bottom entries which are uncommented by a #. After doing so add these 2 entries:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary multiverse

2.Executre apt-get update

3.apt-get install nvidia-glx

4.Again with vi edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the videocard section from "nv" to "nvidia"

5.Finally just execute /etc/init.d/gdm restart

That should work, Ubuntu will install the latest nvidia drivers 71XX.

* Erase "Load dri" !!!