Ubuntu Nvidia problems with Dell Latitude C840

For those of you that don't know, I'm the systems administrator for a non-profit organization. I work on numerous projects throughout the day, but there is a lot of fun to be had with some of the donations that we get in as well. One of these donations happened to be a Dell Latitude C840. Depending on the speed and condition of the hardware we get in, I choose various operating systems to be installed. More often then not I choose a flavor of linux.

Chromium OS was released yesterday so I decided to install a fresh copy of Ubuntu 9.04 as Chromium OS requires Ubuntu 8.04 or above. Having installed an earlier version of Ununtu on this same laptop I knew that I had issues with the Nvidia drivers working properly with xserver.

When you install the Restricted Nvidia drivers for the first time you will be required to reboot the system. You'll notice that when you boot back into your login screen that the screen will be black. Don't Panic! This can be fixed. When this first happened to me I used my google-fu to hunt down a fix. I found this blog post over at brainyautomation.com:

nano -w /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-kernel-nkc

# add this to the end of the file
options nvidia NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0 NVreg_Mobile=0

He suggests booting into recovery mode from grub, but I went a different route:

• Press Ctrl+Alt+F4 to take you to a virtual console. Login.
• Type "sudo nano -w /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-kernel-nkc" If you're like me, you DON'T have this file created already so it will be empty. That's ok, just save it with the next line anyway.
• "options nvidia NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0 NVreg_Mobile=0"
• Ctrl+O and save.
• Back in the shell type "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart"
• Xserver should now restart and bring you back to a login screen. If not, you can press Ctrl+Alt+F7 and get back to GNOME.

Once I did that I had one more problem once I got back into GNOME. The window borders were missing. Again I used my google-fu and found my answer...this time from the Ubuntu Forums.

• Press Ctrl+Alt+F4 to take you to a virtual console. Login.
• Type "sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals"
• Back in the shell type "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart"
• Xserver should now restart and bring you back to a login screen. If not, you can press Ctrl+Alt+F7 and get back to GNOME.

After this you should now have window borders again. I hope this helps someone at some point. Next up I will guide you through how to install Chromium OS.