[PLUG] Hung X

[Richard C. Steffens]

I suspect I should have done things differently but ...

Last week I thought I was ready to switch from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04. I
had enough things working on 12.04 that I figured I'd be able to find
work arounds live, so to speak. There are three bits of hardware I
wanted to move from my old machine to my new machine, an nVidia card, a
Sound Blaster Live card, and a SCSI card. I took those out of my 10.04
machine and put them into my 12.04 machine. What I didn't do was to
unload the nVidia driver from the 10.04 machine before pulling the card.
I replaced the nVidia card with a Radeon card. Startup of the 10.04
machine wasn't smooth, but eventually I was able to -- I thought --
remove the nVidia driver and go with the (mumble-mumble) driver for the
Radeon card. Things worked okay for a day or so. However, for whatever
reason the machine decided it needed to restart. Now, X only gets as far
as showing the wallpaper on the two monitors, and nothing else. The
mouse works, but all it does is move its pointer around.

I dropped into a terminal and see the following error messages:

Many lines of (EE) FBDEV(0): FBIOPUTCHAMP: Invalid argument
(EE) Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA X driver not
found)
cp: cannot stat `/ext/x11/xorg.conf': No such file or directory
/etc/gdm/failsafeXinit: line 113: return: zenity: numeric argument required
cp: cannot stat `/etc/x11/xorg.conf': No such file or directory
/etc/gdm/failsafeXinit: line 113: return: zenity: numeric argument required
cp: cannot stat `/etc/x11/xorg.conf': No such file or directory
/etc/gdm/failsafeXinit: line 113: return: zenity: numeric argument required


I am able to exit xinit with <CTRL>c, after which the rest of the
machine comes back up. I can log in, and I can do stuff from the command
line, including issuing a halt command.

What I want to do is to take the nVidia card, as well as the Sound
Blaster Live card and the SCSI card out of the new machine and put them
into the old machine. I'm sure this won't fix my problem, but that's
where I want to end up.

The current question is how do I tell the machine to stop looking for
the nVidia driver?

Would it help to remove the Radeon card and just use the VGA port on the
mother board?

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens