Why I Went All "Minty"

An interesting story.

On Friday I shutdown my laptop cleanly, packed it up, and put it in the car. I drove home and left it in the trunk all weekend. I came into work on Monday and brought my laptop bag in. I unpacked my laptop, docked it, and fired it up.

No display.

It booted, I heard the music, it should have been at the login display, but there was nothing but a blank screen and the monitor gave me that all knowing "there is no cable" kind of thing and went to sleep.

I could not even get a ctl-alt-f1 terminal. I tried booting up in and out of dock, normal mode, single user mode, recovery mode. I even tried it standing on one foot with a flag in my hand. But all I ever got was a whole lot of blankness.

So once I booted into single mode and was at a terminal, I started my investigations.

In the interest of brevity, I will speed this story up.

I messed around with the laptop for hours on Monday, no display. I had been running Ubuntu 10.04 so I did an upgrade to 10.10 hoping that would restore some order. During that time I ended up using my personal laptop (also running Ubuntu 10.10) to SSH onto the build servers to keep working. Tuesday morning, I managed to get the laptop working in the wrong display mode using the VESA display driver after much futzing around. I used that opportunity to back up everything in preparation for a reload.

Now before I reloaded, I was going through the Xorg.0.log files to see what was going on. Since I really didn't understand the process, some things did not make sense at first, but after 2 days of it, they started to.

So this is my guess as to what happened...

Last week I took some updates from Ubuntu. I thought I rebooted, but maybe I had not. Anyway, the Xorg.0.log was showing 2 video drivers vying for resources, the nv driver and the nouveau driver. I had been using the nv driver and I don't recall loading the nouveau driver and I think this may have somehow come in with the update I took. If not, I am at a loss as to how it got there.

So once the nouveau driver got installed, it would grab something the nv driver needed but nouveau had no clue what to do. And since nv couldn't grab the resources, it simply quit. Hence, I had no working display driver. At least this was my understanding from the log files.

It was at this point I knew I really needed to reload everything as I did not want to sort out this mess.

So I took my CD with 64-bit Mint 10 and installed it. I booted up and read "32-bit" once I logged in. Aw crap! So I go back and download the actual 64-bit Mint 10 DVD this time, and installed the real 64-bit Mint.

I decided since the day was blown anyway I might as well try and get the Nvidia driver working to get 3D acceleration. 

Everything went exceedingly smooth except no display. For an hour and a half I wrangled with Nvidia and Googled like mad. Then I had an epiphany as I sat staring at my sleeping external monitor. I popped the lid of the docked laptop and saw the login display patiently waiting. 

Palm to the face!

I think that it had been there since the first load of the Nvidia driver. 

Ok, stop right there. I know what you are thinking: "well maybe that was the original problem, it just quit displaying on the external monitor". 

Ah, you may think that, but I tried getting the stupid thing working in and out of dock so I had removed the external monitor from the equation and was operating on the LCD panel of the laptop itself. So there.

The laptop dock I have is one of those combination dock/external monitor stand contraptions. So opening the laptop lid is not an option, I could only crack it open an inch or two. I had to get on the floor and try to look at the LCD screen and get to the point of "detect displays" on the Nvidia settings app. No small feat actually considering the poor visibility at that angle of viewing.

So after a couple of tweaks, I now have Linux Mint all shiny and smooth in 3D on my external monitor and laptop's LCD screen. I have to get my environment back to the way I like it, but I have the important things, like email and such, completely restored to what was working before.

I have not completely given up on Ubuntu, in fact, Mint is based on Ubuntu. But for my main workstation, I can't afford the lost time in Canonical's creative side tinkering around with the user interface, or display drivers.

All in all, it was no fun having to spend so much time doing something I shouldn't have needed to do. But on the other hand given Canonical's direction with Ubuntu, it was on my path anyway to eventually reload the laptop with a different distro.

Copyright 2011, Kevin Farley (a.k.a. sixdrift, a.k.a. neuronstatic)