Entering ubuntu without Nvidia graphic card drivers

Question

I have an old vaio with win 7 and ubuntu 14.04, with a NVIDIA Geforce 8400M. Now the screen is a mess with squares and lines both in ubuntu and windows. I think the graphic card is broken.

By entering in windows safe mode I was able to unistall Nvidia drivers and now I can enter windows without any problems (I think due to the use of the native intel graphic card). I want to do a similar thing for ubuntu. What can I do in order to use ubuntu without the nvidia graphic card? Thanks a lot.

Sounds like science fiction. If the graphics card doesn't work, what do you connect the monitor to? — mikewhatever, Mar 05 '16 at 22:47
I use it with the Nvidia drivers disabled, and it works using just the native intel graphic card I think — user84504, Mar 07 '16 at 11:05

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

Ok I've found a way. First I've tried the first solution from this topic without success. Then I've tried this other solution but I've had problems with apt-get due to impossibility to writing in /var/cache/apt/.

In the end I mixed the two solutions. In summary:

Boot with a LiveCD

Mount Ubuntu root partition, change XY accordingly:

sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt

Mount some partitions:

sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys

Change root directory to the mounted Ubuntu partition:

sudo chroot /mnt

Last, from the 2nd link, remove nvidia drivers:

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
echo 'nouveau' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

This works great for me, Ubuntu works perfect with low impact on graphics

Entering ubuntu without Nvidia graphic card drivers

1 Answers1