When upgrading my development machine to Ubunty 11.04, Natty Narwal, I also had a problem with nvidia drivers, and I want to list all possible solutions to fix that. First the symptoms: my Ubuntu would boot up, but the screen would just turn black. When booting in failsafeX it would work, but not with Unity (I would get white areas instead of window-content), because it needs the 3D acceleration? But when trying to enable the nvidia card in any way, and rebooting normally, I would end up with black screens. So what did i attempt to fix all that:
- I removes the previously installed drivers and installed them again: this will make sure the drivers are rebuilt against the current kernel. This could already help.
- Booting through failsafeX and activating the current driver; also using the previous driver (173): did not help me either
- i added
UNITY_FORCE_START=1to/etc/environmentas mentioned here (as GeForce 7300/7400 are blacklisted, but i have a GeForce Go 7100) But it all kept failing. So, last resort (I should have thought of it earlier), I investigated the X-logfiles. Inside my/var/log/Xorg.0.logI found that nvidia had problems allocating the memory: [bash] [14.055] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to allocate primary buffer: out of memory. [14.055] (EE) NVIDIA(0): *** Aborting *** [/bash] Apparently this is a known bug, and i had to do the following to fix this: - edit
/etc/default/grub - find the option
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUXand add nopat, so for me this looked like [bash] GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nopat" [/bash] - run
sudo update-grubAnd then, finally, everything worked fine for me :) Hope this helps.