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Yesterday I finally got around to upgrading from 10.04 to 11.04 (I'm very forgetful about such things). I did an upgrade through the update manager, first to 10.10, then to 11.04. Unfortunately, I've run into an issue, stemming primarily (I believe) from the fact that my hardware doesn't seem to support Unity.

When I boot my machine, I get a screen that looks like this one (linked because the original image is kinda large). It stays on this screen indefinitely, with no animation, no mouse movement, no dialogs, etc.

However, I am still perfectly able to connect to the machine via SSH, and even create NoMachine connections with a Gnome session running on the computer. So it isn't freezing, it just no longer presents a working GUI frontend on the primary monitor. Needless to say, this is inconvenient. So I'm going to purchase a Unity-approved graphics card for the beast, but I'm wondering if there's anything I can do in the meantime, to get a Gnome or Xfce session going when I'm at the physical machine. Thanks to SSH it would be very easy for me to manipulate config files.

EDIT: Information about my graphics card:

$ lspci -v | grep VGA
  00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C73 [GeForce 7050 
  / nForce 610i] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
asfallows
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2 Answers2

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The Troubleshooting Blank Screen at Ubuntu Wiki provides enough information about how to manage these issues, which I can't say what would fit your needs but take a look at that document in order to get a clue on where to start.

Quoted from the site:

If you see a screen of a different color (brown, white, multi-colored corruption, etc.) you are seeing a different class of graphics bug. Obtaining register dumps (see below) may still be of value however.

In my case what solved my problem was to edit the GRUB List at /boot/grub/grub.cfg and remove the "splash" parameter of each GRUB's entry, which may be different in your case as mentioned in the Wiki page:

To check this, in the grub menu edit the kernel line and remove 'splash' from the end of the line, and boot. If that solves the issue, you can remove it from your /boot/grub/menu.lst as a workaround.

NOTE: even when this document refers to the menu.lst file, that file doesn't exist inside my /boot/grub folder, which is grub.cfg in my case. (I can't say why but no need to comment about it)

Also Check the Analysis techniques section of the page in order to gather further information related to your specific issue and let us know, somebody may have more experience with your specific problem than I do.

Keep us posted on your issue.

Good luck.

P.S. You can edit your /boot/grub/grub.cfg using a live session CD/DVD but make sure you always keep a backup of your original file.

Geppettvs D'Constanzo
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2

A couple suggestions to try:

  1. xorg.conf - possibly you had installed a nvidia driver, but through the upgrade it has been replaced by the open-source variant. Try via SSH sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
  2. KMS issue - possibly you have to boot with nomodeset in your grub boot option. Whilst booting press shift to display your grub. Press e to edit the grub line. Then add nomodeset immediately before quiet splash. CTRL + X to boot.
fossfreedom
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