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I formatted my whole hard drive, and installed Elementary OS (Ubuntu 10.10) on it in an attempt to get rid of all the problems. It failed.

Every since I installed the nvidia-current drivers I first need to boot into recovery mode, and run sudo nvidia-xconfig before booting the system in the normal way.
If I don't do this, it will just stop at a black screen after the boot screen, responding to nothing but CTRL+ALT+DELETE and the power button.

When I boot the system after running the nvidia-xconfig command I can just start working as usual.

Update

I suspect it's got something to do with Plymouth. I shall have to try it again before I can confirm it, but removing the quiet and splash parameters from the kernel line in /boot/grub/grub.cfg seems to help.
But still, I like my Plymouth screen. A black screen with text rolling over it (or without the text) doesn't attract me much.

Update

It seems this hasn't got anything do do with it, and if it does, it only made things worse. I had to reboot for a full 15 minutes today before I finally got my login screen. Anything that helps would be greatly appreciated, because this is getting extremely annoying.
Also, I'm not so sure anymore if nvidia-xconfig is at all related to this problem. Today I tried running nvidia-xconfig as usual, and it didn't work :s Also I checked what was the difference between the old and the newly genereated /etc/X11/xorg.conf file using diff. Conslusion: There wasn't any difference.

Things like this also won't do the idea that open-source and free software are "cheap, and crappy alternatives for other pieces of software" and that "they are in fact so bad that they can give them away for free because nobody would want to pay any money for it" any good.

Update

I think it must be just totally random. Most of the times it stops at the black screen, and there's about a 1 out of 20 chance that it works.

Some log files

/home/robin/.xsession-errors: http://minus.com/mstiPA8Du#3
/var/log/boot.log: http://minus.com/mstiPA8Du#4
/var/log/Xorg.*: http://minus.com/mstiPA8Du#5

RobinJ
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1 Answers1

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nVidia 260.19.06 drivers are known to be buggy with many users reporting exactly the same issue you have.

That is version that Ubuntu 10.10 uses on the repos so that version of the package will not work for you. You need to remove the package and install a more recent version of the drivers, I recommend the latest version directly from the nVidia site or from the Ubuntu-X team.

Bruno Pereira
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