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I recently tried changing the driver for my Asus Radeon HD 7870 to the proprietary one (a friend told me it was much faster), however that seems to have killed my install of Ubuntu. Now whenever I boot up it shows me GRUB, I select Ubuntu, and then it boots up for a second or two and then blackscreens. I think the blackscreen is caused by it reaching the login screen, as it is also at that point that I can SSH into it.

So can anyone tell me how to switch back to the open source driver?

Edit: And I'll add, when I boot Ubuntu off of a USB, everything works fine.

Edit: Ok here my process is for the driver.

  1. Install Radeon HD 7870 in my system
  2. Boot up, everything is working fine automatically
  3. I go and check and it is using the open source driver (I checked by going into the Software and Updates program and going to the driver tab)
  4. A friend recommends I switch to the propietary one as it is faster (I believe it was something along the lines of flgrx-updates)
  5. I go into the Software and Updates program, and navigate to the drivers tab. From there I selected the flgrx-updates one and hit ok.
  6. I reboot my system, and then it won't work. After some basic troubleshooting, I come here.

Update: Thanks to gertvdijk I have managed to disable the propietary driver, but Ubuntu still will not beat up. I'm guessing that for whatever reason the open source driver has not been automatically enabled. Anyone have any ideas? Are there any system logs I can give you guys to help find the problem?

scaru
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5 Answers5

8

For 14.04 and upwards, jockey-text isn't installed or available in the repository. I have just recovered from an issue where the Noveau driver caused my computer to lockup completely after logging in and I needed to go back to the nvidia driver. Here's how I did it:

At the login screen, instead of logging in I went to a terminal using CRL + ALT + F2 Type

ubuntu-drivers devices

to get a list of your devices and identify the one you want. My output looked like this:

$ ubuntu-drivers devices
== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00000391sv00001462sd00000630bc03sc00i00
vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
model : G73 [GeForce 7600 GT]
driver : nvidia-304 - distro non-free recommended
driver : nvidia-173 - distro non-free
driver : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin
driver : nvidia-304-updates - distro non-free

I wanted nvidia-304 so I typed:

apt-get install nvidia-304

Then I rebooted and confirmed using the desktop appliaction Additional Drivers that I was indeed using the driver I had chosen.

TenLeftFingers
  • 1,234
4

I just wanted to chime in here because I just had the exact same problem (running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS). I selected a different video card driver in the system settings, and after rebooting, my computer prompted me to start in low-graphics mode.

What fixed the problem for me was deleting /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Now, X11 is the window manager used by Ubuntu, and it loads all files ending in .conf for its settings (at least - that's what 3 minutes of Google told me).

Since I would be hesitant to outright remove files that may in retrospect prove essential, I renamed it to something else:

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
sudo reboot

This fixed the problem for me.

Initially, my idea was to use the command line to change the video card driver back. I resorted to trying this idea because I couldn't find a way to change the video card driver. One suggested answer said to use jockey-text (How to change proprietary video driver using the command line?); however, starting with 14.04 jockey-text isn't part of Ubuntu anymore.

Some additional research: I read that X11 doesn't create an xorg.conf by default anymore. Above solution might not work for you.

Community
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Nietvoordekat
  • 41
3

To unistall the proprietary drivers, you should be able to simply do: 

sudo apt-get remove fglrx   fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-pxpress

if you have intalled the standard drivers, or 

sudo apt-get remove fglrx-updates   fglrx-amdcccle-updates

if you have the "updates" one.

Remember to manually delete the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf; otherwise X will still search for the proprietary drivers and will not start correctly (most of the times).

This would normally re-enable the default (open-source) drivers.

Rmano
  • 32,167
2

After no one giving any additional answers for 2 days, I decided to try to reinstall Ubuntu. I created a Ubuntu live USB, and using that told it to reinstall Ubuntu (replaces system files, but keeps my files), and that worked perfectly.

scaru
  • 181
0

Run over SSH:

jockey-text --list

then identify the driver you want to disable and run

sudo jockey-text --disable driveridentification

Replace driveridentification with the ID your driver shows up with (e.g. xorg:nvidia_experimental_310 in my case). I am unable to test/verify this at the moment.

jockey-text is the command-line text-only version of the "additional drivers" application in the regular GUI. You should be able to perform the same tasks as in the regular GUI application - see the help on other tasks: 

jockey-text --help

This will work in your case as you say that you can still log in using SSH. For other readers who haven't set up SSH on their machine, they'll need to boot into recovery mode or to blacklist the graphics driver kernel module on the Grub command line and then perfoming the jockey changes.

gertvdijk
  • 69,427