Switching to Ctrl+Alt+F1 and back to desktop (Ctrl+Alt+F7) : Blank Screen and garbled display

Question

Go to tty1 with Control + Alt + F1.

Go back to desktop with Control + Alt + F7

Screens stays blank. Cursor changes from an arrow to a hand.

When I then close and re-open the lid the screen comes back up but is seriously garbled. I need to minimize all applications to make them proper. The desktop does not refresh though and requires logging out and in.

nvidia version 173 is active.

What is the best way of triaging this?

Answer 1

OK - my thoughts on trying to triage this.

• Is this a compiz issue? Try logging in as ubuntu classic

Switch off all visual effects. Does the garbled display occur? If not, likely to be a compiz issue. If it does, maybe a nvidia driver issue.

Now switch on visual effects - Does the garbled display occur? If not, then likely to be a Unity type issue. If it does, more likely to be a compiz issue.

• Is this a driver issue? Deactivate the nvidia driver through the Additional Drivers window. Does the garbled display occur? If it doesnt then is likely to be a nvidia driver vs compiz issue.

CCSM was deliberately left out of the default install, because it was found that users making changes could make the graphical display unstable. If you have been playing with various CCSM setting maybe this is your issue.

Try resetting compiz to its defaults:

gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/compiz
sudo reboot --

Repeat the above to see if the issue was due to changes in compiz that you may have made.

Answer 2

It took a few reboots because I started looking at the wrong things (log files show no errors) but the problem lies within the nVidia driver version 173.

173 is not the recommended driver as seen in the image and reverting back to the recommended one also solved the problem.

(the 'not in use' seems to be a bug (driver is in use) so I am not too worried about that).