Date: 03/15/08 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: php, web

From searching the Ubuntu forums, it seems that a lot of other people are having this same problem. I bought my new motherboard (with onboard graphics) because several people told me that nVidia is excellent with Ubuntu, but this whole experience has seriously soured me on nVidia. My motherboard is an nforce 630i from XFX, and the onboard graphics card is an nVidia geforce 7100. I have nvidia-glx-new installed, after nvidia-glx didn't work - switching to nvidia-glx-new hasn't changed a thing, but it's what's still installed.

As seems to be the case with so many folks, X keeps starting in low graphics mode. It informs me that it couldn't properly detect my graphics card or screen, and gives me the option of manually configuring them. I do so, telling it to use the nvidia driver and that my monitor is 1024x768, and I click OK; it immediately decides to ignore what I've just told it and boots into 800x600, which it had started to do anyway. Going to System->Preferences->Screen Resolution shows me that it won't allow me to choose any resolution above 800x600; going to System->Administration->Screens and Graphics shows me that it's back using the vesa driver (which is the default in low graphics mode) and thinks I'm using a Plug n' Play monitor that only supports 800x600 resolution.

I have run dpkg-configure xserver-xorg more times than I can count and am sure everything is as it should be; no joy.

My xorg.conf, Xorg.0.log, and results from lsmod (remember I was in low graphics mode when I ran these - I don't know if that makes a difference) are available at http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4521613&postcount=10 .

I tried running dmesg and it scrolled so far that I couldn't see the beginning anymore. Should I post just as much as is left in my terminal?

Also, my sound isn't working either. Is that a function of low graphics mode for some reason, or am I going to have to troubleshoot that separately? At the moment I'm more concerned with sorting out the graphics, but the missing sound is an annoyance as well. Going to System->Preferences->Sound, selecting the Devices tab, and clicking any of the Test buttons gets me this error message:

audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 !
audioconvert ! audioresample !
gconfaudiosink: Could not open source for writing.

ETA: I tried Envy, and it told me that my video card is not compatible with any version of the driver. wtf?

ETA2: I found the appropriate driver version on nVidia's website and used Envy to manually install it. I've rebooted and all seems well now! Now to deal with the sound issue. Any help on that?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computergeeks/1158438.html