Comment 9 for bug 626918

Hi Guys, I'm really loving 10.10 and thank you again for all your great work!

While waiting for the new fix to arrive here's a work-around that's working for me:

* make sure you have a (previously working) /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

* change the line, in the xorg.conf file, that loads the nvidia driver to load nouveau instead. ie: change this:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Device0"
    Driver "nvidia"
    VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

to this:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Device0"
    Driver "nouveau"
EndSection

* remove all the nvidia-specific packages in the system (try dpkg --list | grep -i nvidia to get a list of them.) In particular you want to remove the nvidia kernel driver that gets loaded before X starts. This is because it grabs the video screen and prevents the nouveau driver from loading. In my case I just removed all the packages with the word nvidia in their name.

* It turns out that I already had the nouveau driver installed. Here's what I've got that has a name with "nouveau" in it:

$ dpkg --list | grep -i nouveau
ii libdrm-nouveau1 2.4.22+git20100929.624e58e3-0ubuntu0sarvatt Userspace interface to nouveau-specific kernel DRM services -- runtime
ii xserver-xorg-video-nouveau 1:0.0.16+git20101003.9a5142fa-0ubuntu0sarvatt X.Org X server -- Nouveau display driver (experimental)

Again, I don't know if this will be the case for other users; I've tried so many changes to my system to get it to work that I'm not clear on what you might need or where it might come from. Just check if you've got the nouveau stuff on your system. In case it helps I've got these repos installed (again, though, you may not need them so I recommend you try them only as a last resort:)

http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu
http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu

* If you've got the correct nouveau code installed on your system it seems that you don't have to do anything to get the kernel to load the required driver. (Don't forget the change, as indicated above, to your xorg.conf file.)

Surprisingly, that's all. The system just works fine (minus the 3d graphics) after you reboot. If you don't want to reboot you can service kdm stop and service gdm stop, then rmmod nvidia, rmmod (some other graphic drivers that get stuck in the system such as video and output,) then service kdm start.

I wish I could say that I'll stick to this setup and forget about getting the proprietary nvidia code to work ASAP - but the nouveau driver is sluggish. It's not just the 3d functionality that I'm missing - there's a notable performance penalty (on my 7-8 year old Toshiba P20.)

Thanks again for all your effort, it's really appreciated and bearing a vast amount of fruit. There's no doubt in my mind that kubuntu 10.10 will be remembered as a major milestone in the history of computing.

Thanks again,
God bless,
Sam.