Saturday 19 May 2012

Precise Pangolin and GeForce4 MX 4000

My graphics card  is this

mars@twelve-M266:~$ lspci  | grep Ge
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000] (rev c1)

I upgraded the computer to precise pangolin (no problems) and then rebooted. The highest screen resolution I could get was 640 x 480 
To summarise several hours of my life that I will never get back, there are problems , other than the usual ones, with NVIDIA cards and the upgrade process.
 
Problems with nvidia drivers are summarised here 
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=179489 

to get the display working  I had to 
  • remove nvidia-current 
  • remove nvidia-common. it also says it will remove ubuntu-desktop. Keep going - there is still a desktop after the process 
  • remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf
 
then reboot. 
It will start a GUI.
Go to the display option, (R click on desktop-> change background -> all settings->display
Select your screen and change the resolution 
Reboot  ( not just log out of X and start again 
 
It is using the nouveau driver. There is no xorg.conf (no idea why not). 
It struggles to run the unity desktp but gnome-classic ( which i use) is fine