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its been a few years since I used Linux last, so bear with me.

I have a Lenovo Ideapad 700 with a Nvidia GTX950M graphicscard, but after changing the display driver I'm unable to log in to the GUI.

I had a functioning Ubuntu up and running, but suddenly I started getting a lot of "nouveau E[PFIFO][0000:01:00.0] SCHED_ERROR[UNK06]" errors during booting. Google told me this was a problem with the graphics driver. I used a workaround by adding 'nomodeset' in grub, and managed to log in. Then I used the Software Updater thingy in Ubuntu to change from the Nouveau driver to one from Nvidia. I don't recall exactly what version number it had, but it said (proprietary, tested).

Now, when I boot I end up at the login screen (previously it autologged in). When I try to log in it plays a sad drum-sound, and falls back to the login screen.

I've tried CTRL-ALT-2 to go to terminal, and from there I've tried calling 'sudo startx'. It fails after a couple of seconds.

If I then run

cat /var/log/Xorg.1.log | grep "(EE)"

it says

open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory
Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section
FBDEV(0): FBIOBLANK: Invalid argument
Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA X driver not found)

I've tried booting into safemode via grub, but have not been able to get access to the GUI.

When I run

lshw -class video

I get two entries. Both says UNCLAIMED. One is from NVIDIA, and one is from Intel.

What can I do to fix this? What other checks should I do?

Frode Lillerud
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1 Answers1

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Step 1 : Remove nomodeset from the grub file.

Step 2 : Update GRUB - run sudo update-grub

Step 3 : Remove all NVIDIA software installed.

Highlight the Ubuntu menu entry and press the E key.
Add nouveau.modeset=0 to the end of the linux line.
Press the F10 key to boot into the Ubuntu system.

When the login screen appears press Ctrl+Alt+F1.
Enter user name and password, then execute : 

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo reboot

Step 4 : Install the NVIDIA drivers and Optimus.

Highlight the Ubuntu menu entry and press the E key.
Add nouveau.modeset=0 to the end of the linux line.
Press the F10 key to boot into the Ubuntu system.

When the login screen appears press Ctrl+Alt+F1.
Enter user name and password, then execute : 

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-352 nvidia-prime
sudo reboot
cl-netbox
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  • Unfortunately this didn't help. After completing all the steps, I still end up at the login screen, and unable to log in. Are there any commands I should run to further figure out what the cause is? – Frode Lillerud Mar 04 '16 at 21:27
  • @FrodeLillerud : I suggest that you install Ubuntu 15.10, because Ubuntu 15.04 is not supported anymore. Once the Ubuntu system installation is complete, first of all install the NVIDIA drivers as described above ! – cl-netbox Mar 05 '16 at 10:13
  • I ended up reinstalling Ubuntu 15.04, and upgraded the Kernel to 4.3 (which had some nouveau/NVIDIA fixes), and it works now. I'm going to use this machine for ROS - Robot Operating System, and unfortunately it doesn't support 15.10. Thanks for your help. – Frode Lillerud Mar 05 '16 at 12:34
  • @FrodeLillerud Well, then consider downgrading to 14.04 LTS which is a Long Term Support release and will receive updates until 2019. That's probably better than staying with an unsupported release. – Byte Commander Mar 05 '16 at 17:47
  • @ByteCommander Ah, never really thought about what LTS meant. So 15.04 will not have any updates when I call "apt-get upgrade" any more? Is that what that means? And can I downgrade to 14.04 without loosing all my setup? – Frode Lillerud Mar 05 '16 at 22:44
  • Not sure, but I think you can't easily downgrade directly. Probably a reinstall would be better... There's a question about that here though. Make sure you have a backup of all data before you start! And yes, 15.04 doesn't receive any updates any more. Its repositories are no longer maintained and got moved to an archive server, so you can't even install any old software packages without changing your software sources to that archive server first. – Byte Commander Mar 06 '16 at 11:45