Ubuntu – How to re-create the x-terminal-emulator alternative

urxvt is probably the single most configurable emulator out there. Install it with

sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode

Then edit the ~/.Xdefaults file adding the following:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt.urlLauncher: xdg-open
URxvt.matcher.button: 1
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1: \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-\[\]]*[\\w/-]

Using xdg-open allows you to use whatever browser you have specified in system settings (works for Gnome at least, unsure about KDE). Unfortunately, the default looks of urxvt are not, shall I say, very convincing, it's more like the old xterm than the modern gnome-terminal, and the configuration runs through config files rather than context menus. There is a tutorial on how to configure it, however.

Personally, I don't mind such configuration mode, in my experience you rarely want to reconfigure your terminal.

I was having the same issue with Dell Vostro 1500 (GeForce 8400M GS, the nvidia-340 driver) after updating to the recent Ubuntu 16.04.2. It took me almost a day to find out.

It turned out that after

• setting the alternatives back auto (i.e. nvidia proprietary drivers)
• running ldconfig
• and manually inserting the DRI modules (sudo modprobe nvidia_340 nvidia_340_uvm nvidiafb)

startx run from commandline started X correctly with the proprietary driver. Also the display manager when run manually (not as a systemd service) was using the proprietary driver.

After some more investigation it turned out that the culprit was the /usr/bin/gpu-manager (run via /lib/systemd/system/gpu-manager.service). Its log /var/log/gpu-manager.log was saying:

Looking for nvidia modules in /lib/modules/4.4.0-72-generic/updates/dkms
Found nvidia module: nvidia_340_uvm.ko
Is nvidia loaded? yes
Was nvidia unloaded? no
Is nvidia blacklisted? yes

And eventually it updated the alternatives to the mesa/ld.so.conf.

From this point on it was easy to find out that the nvidia-340 module was indeed blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d/bumblebee.conf

This was apparently a leftover from a previous driver nvidia-304, which was using bumblebee. The nvidia-340 driver doesn't use bumblebee.

So simply deleting /etc/modprobe.d/bumblebee.conf solved the problem. The other alternative is to purge delete previous nvidia driver installation, as other tutorials say. Obviously I haven't sufficiently purged the previous driver installation...