Ubuntu – Ubuntu 12.04 nomodeset fixes boot problem but causes screen resolution to get stuck

12.04hpnomodesetnouveaunvidia

I've been searching the askubuntu forum for the past 3 days trying to figure out what's going on with my system and I have tried a lot of things but to no avail. So, I will explain my situation and tell you what I have tried and I hope someone can help me 🙂

I have an:
HP Workstation xw4100
Pentium(R) 4 3.00 GHz
1.5 GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro4 380 XGL graphics card

It came with Windows XP and I set it up (with WUBI) to dual boot with Ubuntu 12.04

After installation I had the problem that so many people had with it booting to a black screen (mine was actually booting to the terminal basic shell) that is fixed by adding nomodeset into the grub. When I do that, MY screen resolution becomes stuck in 1280×768 (as opposed to 1366×768 before adding nomodeset) (and also, when running XP the best resolution is 1280×720)

When I go to "additional drivers" it doesn't show any proprietary drivers, so I manually downloaded them using this command:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

but after rebooting, that made the graphics even worse (now stuck as 800×600) SO I tried to configure the drivers with sudo nvidia-xconfig but that simply created an empty xorg.config file. I found one place where a guy gave information to manually input into the xorg.config file but that had no effect at all.

Lastly I tried to install previous versions of the NVIDIA drivers, but they wouldn't even fully install.

So now I have just re-installed Ubuntu 12.04 and I either need to find a better solution to the first problem (nomodeset) or get the nouveau driver to correctly configure to work with my nvidia graphics.

Thanks for your help ahead of time!

Best Answer

I guess that is the wrong repository to use (if the FLOSS driver "nouveau" does not work), start by removing the packages you have installed and repository you have added to avoid conflicts.

Please try with the steps explained in this blog post at the last section "Setting up Nvidia Optimus"

this will install the latest Nvidia proprietary drivers :

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings

If you are sure you have optimus features or a second integrated graphics cards like Intel you can proceed with Bumblebe installation as following :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia
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