I have a sony vaio desktop (PCV RZ221) which runs windows xp. I installed ubuntu on a separate partition. The install runs fine but the graphics runs on fallback drivers even though it has a nvidia geforce ti 4660 graphics card installed. I have tried installing the nvidia drivers (nvidia-96) which were recommended by the 'Additional Drivers' application. This results in complete garbled text and video. Everything turns white once I restart the system after installing the nvidia drivers. The nouveau drivers do not work etiher.
I have tried three different versions of ubuntu (10.10, 11.04 and 11.10) and all of them have the same issue.
Below is the technical information of the motherborad
Technical Platform
Architecture
SiS 651
CPU Section
Processor Name
Intel® Pentium® 4 processor
Processor Manufacturer
Intel
Processor Speed (Mhz)
3060
Model
3.06 Ghz
Type
Pentium IV
L2 Cache (kb)
512
Graphics
Graphic Card Name
nVidia GeForce4 TI4600
Total Graphics Memory (MB)
128
Best Answer
Old video cards often dont like KMS and can result in the garbled video display you have indicated.
I would try adding the boot option "nomodeset" for either the open-source graphics driver or the nvidia-96 driver.
If you are having an issue with "nomodeset" as well, try forcing the use of VESA graphics until you install the nvidia driver i.e. use "xforcevesa" as the boot option or in combination "nomodeset xforcevesa"
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