NVIDIA Graphics Card, Karmic Koala, No Virtual Terminals
I’ve just upgraded my machine from an AMD Athlon64 Socket 939 to an AMD Athlon64 Socket AM2+, part of the re-install of my system after the upgrade involved me installing Karmic Koala 64 Bit (Review coming soon over on Prodigal Programming). Which also meant me re-installing manually the latest graphics drivers from Nvidia for my old 7600GT card which is still faithfully serving me well. Anyone who’s done this or who is simply trying to do this for the first time will realise this usually means dropping to a Virtual Terminal with CTRL + ALT + F(1-6) and anyone trying to do this on Karmic at the moment will realise that you can’t do it because the latest Kernel at this point in time doesn’t seem to like it.
Well I’m sure many of you will realise this, but those of you who are desperately searching for a way to do it and ended up here, I’ve noticed a few people have reported this bug and a few people who are new or newish to Linux trying to install Nvidia drivers and not getting very far with it, so the procedure following will allow you to install your NVidia drivers in a Virtual Terminal and then reboot to your GUI environment:
1) reboot your machine and hold down the SHIFT key as it boots up to get the GRUB menu to appear
2) Select the recovery option for the latest kernel and press enter to boot into recovery mode
3) From the recovery menu select “Drop to a Root Shell” (Doesn’t matter if you choose with networking or not)
4) Once you have a shell prompt type the following > telinit 3
5) You should now be in a root shell at RunLevel 3, allowing you to navigate to the folder that your driver is stored in
IF YOU’VE INSTALLED NVIDIA DRIVERS BEFORE THE REST IS SIMPLE, IF NOT READ ON
6) Once in the folder for your NVidia Driver type the following > sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-*
7) This should give you the basic Shell based Graphical Interface for the installer
The rest is obvious really from the information on screen, however here are a few tips:
Say NO to downloading a pre-compiled version from Nvidia, say yes to compiling one from source and say yes to running nvidia-config to enable the graphics drivers to be used in your xorg.conf file.
You should now have a running NVidia driver in your Karmic Koala installation, simply type > shutdown -r now
Your system will reboot and with any luck, if you’ve chosen the right driver, made the right choices in the installer etc you should see an NVidia splash screen momentarily before seeing the Karmic Login box.
Hope this helps anyone having trouble.
Categories: Articles, Linux Help | 
Tags: Articles, Command Line, Drivers, Graphics Cards, Help, How Tos, Kubuntu, Linux, NVidia, Shell, Ubuntu | 
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Amazon EC2 AMI-Bundling Script for Linux Servers
During the course of a recent project, I needed to make an automated backup system, instead of re-inventing the wheel and creating a full blown backup management application I simply created several scripts to perform the backups to S3 storage, the one I’m releasing here is for automatically bundling your server up, uploading the bundle files to S3 and then registering the new AMI with Amazon AWS Console for you to launch later. It adds todays date to the end of the AMI bundle files and cleans up after itself, so it is quite feasible to use this in a cron script that’s run on a regular basis, or it can simply be used as a one off, run it manually and don’t worry about it kind of script.
If you use the file, you’ll need to edit the variables at the top of the script, I’ve annotated it and tried to explain them clearly in plain English, but in short they are for your Amazon EC2 and S3 certificates and keys which you should have received when signing up for the services, file locations and names and paths to the EC2 tools and Java executable.
You’ll also need to make sure you have the FULL set of EC2 api tools on your server, not just the basic ones that come with the server by default. You can get the full set of Java tools from the Amazon EC2 Resource Center.
I still haven’t created a download file to manage downloads so please remember the following link will change, if you choose to give it out to others for download, please give them the link to this page instead, I will update the link as and when required.
For now you can get the tar file from here:
Automate-Amazon-EC2-Bundle-Server-V.1.0.0.tar.gz
Please note this script is only tested on an Ubuntu 8.10 Server so far, I’d appreciate anyone who has it working on a different OS letting me know so I can add it to the compatibility list here. If anyone has any additions to this that could be useful to others, I’d appreciate you letting me know in the comments.
**Please note, there is NO error handling in this script at the moment, later versions may perform directory checks and error handling if they are needed, but for now you will simply have to make sure that you get your directory paths correct or the script will fail**
Categories: Amazon EC2 | Tags: | 2 Comments »
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