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I've got a Mid 2010 13" Macbook Pro (7.1) that's been running 12.04 happily for the past year or so. I recently upgraded to 12.10, and so reverted to Nouveau graphics drivers. This led to serious 3D rendering problems, so I switched to using nVidia drivers as per https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro7-1/Quantal#Video.2BAC8-Graphic_Card. Unfortunately that didn't go well, leading to an unbootable system after enabling the driver (it got through the Plymouth splash, screen went to black and system was entirely unresponsive). Reverted to Nouveau drivers by booting into recovery shell, remounting the filesystem and using jockey-text --no-dbus to disable the driver. Back to square 1.

I then tried the other available nvidia_current option from the restricted drivers menu (included VPDAU and some other bits, I can't remember exactly what) and rebooted. Once again problems, but different ones. Instead of booting to a graphic login prompt, I get dumped to tty1. tty7 meanwhile is churning away some sort of log, which always ends at apache starting, preceded by LightDM starting. Relevant lines from the end of dmesg seem to be

init: lightdm main process terminated with status 1
...
init: failsafe-x main process terminated with status 1

Annoyingly, I can't revert to nouveau drivers as running jockey-text -l from a tty doesn't show the driver I selected, and all shown graphics drivers are shown as disabled.

It looks related to this bug, I've had all the symptoms listed there running with the nouveau driver (especially the random temporary freezes) since upgrading, and the random mess on the Plymouth screens even under 12.04. Unfortunately that bug seems to have received no attention at all.

I'm up for any methods to either get back to the nouveau driver which at least lets me use the system, or get a working nVidia driver (which would of course be ideal). Any suggestions?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Here are some instructions:

  1. Boot into Recovery Mode
  2. Open a Terminal
  3. Run the following commands:
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
echo 'nouveau' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

This will remove the Nvidia drivers and revert to the nouveau ones. Since the Nvidia drivers have ubuntu-desktop as a dependency, it also reinstalls that.

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