NVIDIA Graphics Card, Karmic Koala, No Virtual Terminals

Hollow — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:41:01 +0000

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.

Prodigal Programming » Shell

NVIDIA Graphics Card, Karmic Koala, No Virtual Terminals