Friday, November 2, 2012

Ubuntu 12.10 - Growing Pains

I guess no matter how good things get with Ubuntu, you still get the usual first boot scares.  In my case, it's the video display (surprise! surprise!).  I run a GeForce 9500 GT and it's an old card for sure.  When I got to finally boot, I got a purple screen and then no video signal issue.  Poking around I realized I had to set the kernel options on grub to nomodeset but it's been a while since I last mucked with grub.  So, I wanted to do a post here that summarizes everything I've learned.

If you don't get the grub menu on boot, just before grub loads, press SHIFT.  Since I had the network boot to start, I had to press CTRL+C to stop network boot and then wait for the routine to exit.  Before the text "grub loading" appears, I was jamming the SHIFT key like crazy.  From there, I edit the first option (ubuntu) and then add nomodeset to the linux/boot entry.

Many, many thanks to this Ubuntu forum thread for the info.  It's nice to see that there's so much self-help information available online to fix these things.

Now it's time to get a real nvidia driver up and running!

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