Nvidia restricted driver, black screen

Also, I receive the same behavior when attempting to install the driver from Nvidia website.

One thing that might be helpful is that when I followed a tutorial online that asked me to blacklist a number of items, namely:

blacklist vga16fb
blacklist nouveau
blacklist rivafb
blacklist nvidiafb
blacklist rivatv

Though I've read a lot about how there is definitely something odd going on with nouveau. Trying to uninstall nouveau by running:

apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

doesn't seem to work. lsmod continues to show that nouveau is loaded.... but this might be another bug all together.

Update: When blacklist nouveau it does not show up in lsmod. So that was a phantom bug I reported in my last comment. The "black-screen" issue however is very real.

When I blacklist nouveau, I do experience the same behavior as originally reported in this bug. So, I'm not entirely convinced that this is related to nouveau. One of those blacklist entries does allow me to get to low-graphics mode, though of course this is not a fix but more of a way to get yourself out of the black-screen situation.

Again, let me know what other information might be helpful in tracking this one down.

nvidia-graphics-drivers (256.35-0ubuntu1) maverick; urgency=low

  [ Alberto Milone ]
  * debian/nvidia-current-dev*:
    - Make the dev package conflict with other dev packages which
      provide nvidia-dev so as to make it possible to install
      headers directly in /usr/include.
  * Adapt the packaging scripts to the new NVIDIA installers.
  * New upstream release:
    - Fixed a 3D Vision Stereo bug that caused the stereo glasses
      to not toggle when the flat panel was not running at its
      native mode timings.
    - Fixed a bug which prevented use of high performance PowerMizer
      levels on systems with certain ACPI configurations.
    - Fixed a bug that caused non-primary Fermi GPUs to fail to
      initialize framebuffer memory. This caused a variety of
      symptoms, up to and including system hangs.
    - Added unofficial GLX protocol support (i.e., for GLX indirect
      rendering) for the following OpenGL extensions:
      o GL_ARB_blend_func_extended
      o GL_ARB_draw_buffers_blend
      o GL_ARB_sample_shading
      o GL_ARB_timer_query
      o GL_EXT_draw_buffers2
      o GL_EXT_separate_shader_objects
      o GL_NV_explicit_multisample
      o GL_NV_transform_feedback
    - Fixed an interaction problem between Compiz and
      'screen-scraping' VNC servers like x11vnc and vino that
      caused the screen to stop updating (LP: #353126).
    - Enhanced VDPAU to add basic support for Xinerama. VDPAU will
      now operate on a single physical X screen under Xinerama.
      See the README for more details.
    - Enhanced VDPAU's handling of corrupt clips of all formats
      on GPUs with VDPAU feature set C to be at least as good as
      on GPUs with VDPAU feature set B. This significantly
      improves various clips provided by nvnews.net user eamiller.
    - Fixed a bug in Xv attribute handling that caused hue,
      saturation, brightness and contrast values to be misapplied
      when using an Xv overlay adaptor.
    - Fixed a bug in the XvMC driver that prevented it from
      working on systems with AGP graphics cards.
    - Enhanced VDPAU to clear all VdpVideoSurfaces to black when
      allocated. This provides more consistent results when using
      a surface as a reference when no prior decode operation has
      written to that surface. In turn, this improves the results
      of decoding some corrupt streams, such as "p_only_no_play"
      from ffmpeg bug 1124.
    - Implemented new APIs to allow sharing VDPAU surfaces with
      OpenGL andCUDA. The OpenGL extension is GL_NV_vdpau_interop.
      For CUDA, please see the documentation in the CUDA toolkit
      for details.
    - Worked around a bug where the combination of a GPU with
      VDPAU feature set A together with specific motherboard
      chipsets could cause visible corruption when decoding some
      MPEG-2 streams.
    - Fixed a bug that prevented the VDPAU overlay-based
      presentation queue from being used more than a few hundred
      times per X server invocation.
    - Renamed the driver file libGLcore.so.VERSION to
      libnvidia-glcore.so.VERSION, as a small step towar...

(Oops, wrong bug, sorry!)

Affects me too. Running on Asus model X42JV

Affects me as well (X42JV-X1), affects Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 and derived distros (Mint 8/9 Kubuntu, etc).

nouveau will not use nVidia 335M. It is loaded, but only the integrated intel chip is used. Black screen occurs when telling X to use nouveau or nvidia device drivers (from restricted repos or downloading from nVidia and compiling). Cannot change to console or boot into safe mode.

Disabling glx / intel drivers does not solve the problem.

I'm not entirely sure if rendering a laptop unusable should be a "low" priority bug.

Thanks folks.

Newegg commented on the same issue:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220739

Appears to be a problem with the BIOS. Very disappointing!

I've tried numerous workarounds, but no joy. Was about to try Suse 11 when I saw the newegg article.

I suspect it's not so much a BIOS issue, though it's possible that disabling the Intel GPU at the hardware level might help.

Anyway to escalate this bug?

Impacts:
Model: Dell Alienware M11x
OS: Ubuntu 10.10 (64-bit)
Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GT 335M

Similar results. - in my case, i see a bit of flickr on boot and then nada

Same Situation here with a Nvidia Geforce GT 335M but on a different board.
I see no way how to disable the intel chip, e.g. in BIOS.

http://idyllictux.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/lucidubuntu-10-04-high-resolution-plymouth-virtual-terminal-for-atinvidia-cards-with-proprietaryrestricted-driver/

Fixes it perfectly here

Thank you, tmokeefe (timothy-okeefe) wrote on 2010-06-25!

I had a different symptom that is all text screen getting white and all the texts being black and backwards almost gibberish at beginning screen and ctrl+alt F1 etc.
But
apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-nouvea
fixed the problem

Thanks!

noob i dont know if this is where i should post this seeing how old this post is but regarding OP, same is true with xubuntu 14.04 64 bit msi nvidia gt240, mb dg9650t with integrated intel video, with nvidia legacy binary driver v. 304.119 and 304.117, nvidia binary driver 331.38 and 331.49... pressing F1 repeatedly at the blinky courser will usually let me in if the shift key won't open grub.

xubuntu rocks