[ale] Upgrading to 9.10 hosed my system

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2009-11-01 at 21:52 -0700, JK wrote:
> Ryan Marshall wrote:
> 
> > I had the exact same issue last night while trying to switch over to the 
> > binary nVidia drivers.
> > 
> > If I understand correctly, it seems like the X server is constantly 
> > crashing and reloading.  On mine, the hard drive light was flashing in 
> > sync with the screen flicker.
> > 
> > Anyway, I rebooted it, brought it up into recovery mode, did a 
> > dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg out of habit and then ran the .run from 
> > the nVidia driver package that I had downloaded after the Ubuntu 
> > automated install failed repeatedly.  Follow the steps in the .run file 
> > and got a beautiful composited desktop on next reboot. 
> 
> 
> That looks like *exactly* what I was seeing - I, too, noticed that the
> HD light and the screen flicker seemed sync'd.  The crash-and-respawn X
> behavior totally explains that, *and* the keyboard weirdness too.
> 
> I'm using the onboard video on my Asus M3N78 MB, which is in fact
> nVidia.  I'll give your suggestion a try when I get back home tomorrow.

I've seen this a couple of times.  It seems that Karmic and the NVIDIA
driver and DKMS all have some issues playing nicely with each other.

I've been building my NVIDIA driver manually from within
the /var/dkms/... tree and then using dkms to install it after manually
building it and putting the module in the location that dkms expects.  I
didn't have to do it when I last updated my kernel, after the release
came out, but there could still be problems lurking somewhere.

Personally, I think this release should have been delayed for a couple
of weeks to have an extended bug fixing period with some extreme focus
on polishing before the release.  That's just my 2¢ though.

	--- Mike

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