Comment 12 for bug 333040

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Gaetan Nadon (memsize) wrote :

Marc,
To answer your question in bug 320671 (my apologies for having misspelled your name), the 9100M G motherboard GPU is not supported by the driver.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_9100m_g_mgpu_us.html
I am not an expert, but I'll share my experience. I have just installed a new nvidia card (gts 250) that was released this month. It's not officially supported by anyone, not even nvidia has a driver for it on Linux. However I am able to get that card working on both 8.04 and 8.10 using official Ubuntu documentation.

All devices on the PCI bus have ids so the driver can make decisions. The ids are located in X.org nv_driver.c. Your GPU id is 0x10de0844 where 10de identifies nvidia and 0844 identifies the 9100M G chipset. Your 0844 id and my 0615 id both aren't there. If you run lspci -n you should get something like this: 01:00.0 0300: 10de:0844. Run lspci -v -s 01:00.0 and you get more details, such as:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0844 (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
This means the card is not "recognized". The driver may ignore this can and the card may work as it is the case for me on 8.04. The driver may decide to quit if it knows that it is not capable of handling the card. This is what it seems to happen in your case (Ignoring unsupported device 0x10de0844).

You have 3 choices when it comes to drivers:
1) The default open source "nv" driver (2D only) maintained by Ubuntu
2) The binary restricted driver (offered by the restricted driver manager - nvidia-glx) which comes from nVidia but is packaged (but not supported) by Ubuntu. Driver 177 in Intrepid does support your card.
3) The binary nVidia driver obtained directly from nVidia.com which is shell script installed. This is not supported by Ubuntu

When booting a fresh install with a known GPU, the default nv driver is always used. There are no cases where the restricted driver would be used. If I understand your case correctly, the default "nv" driver just does not work, the X server does not start and you have no desktop. There may be a reason why the driver rejected your card, perhaps it cannot handle a notebook GPU. It may be a programming error. My card was erroneously recognized on Intrepid as another card.

When you have a desktop running using the "nv" driver (which is not your case) follow instructions:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia

When you want to install the nvidia driver from nvidia.com (seems to be your only choice) follow instructions:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaManual
Driver 177 is recommended and it works for me, while the later driver 180 does not work. You will need to reinitialize the nvidia driver for each kernel upgrade.

Before you do any of this, try this simple action: backup and delete /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It's empty on a fresh install and is generated when booting. It may get the nv driver working. You said desktop was working on Intrepid with default nv driver, and you said Jaunty live CD works fine. That leaves only a migration problem in configuration scripts.