Ubuntu

X server doesn't start

Asked by LEGOManiac

I've been so side-tracked by this problem that I can't remember how I started down this road in the first place. I know it had to do with a video problem I was having which prompted me to install the official nvidia drivers (as opposed to the nouveau drivers).

That let to micro-text which had me trying to increase the font size whereupon I remembered that I had had this problem years earlier and it seemed to me that it had to do with the nvidia drivers using the monitor's default DPI size which results in incredibly small text. I couldn't remember how I solved it so I did some googleing and found this instruction which was the last thing I followed:
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sudo nvidia-xconfig --no-use-edid-dpi
This will generate default xorg.conf and disable use of DPI info acquired from your monitor EDID. Now you are free to specify your desired DPI by placing following inside section "Monitor" of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option "DPI" "96 x 96"
You can change DPI value from 96 to your desired value. Changes should be noticeable after reboot.
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On reboot, I ended up in some sort of Emergency mode, so the first thing I did was to remove the "Option "DPI" "96 x 96"" line from X11/xorg.conf and reboot, but I'm still in the same boat.

In emergency mode, it asks me to run a command that I forgot to write down, but which gives me a log file that displays (in red):

Nov 10 11:37:45 LEGOManiacPC nvidia-persistenced[542]: Failed to query NVIDIA devices. Please ensure that the NVIDIA device files (/dev/nvidia*) exist, and that user 114 has read and write permissions for those files.
Nov 10 11:37:45 LEGOManiacPC nvidia-persistenced[542]: The daemon no longer has permission to remove its runtime data directory /var/run/nvidia-persistenced

Checking /dev, I don't see any nvidia files at all.

It occurs to me that the original information may be years out of date, so I went back to the original link:

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB0QFjAAahUKEwjujMvGq4bJAhUU-mMKHQtaAOk&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.techytalk.info%2Flubuntu-change-fonts-dpi-when-using-proprietary-nvidia-driver%2F&usg=AFQjCNEglBM03LNNuor5YMO6ZVqMEjD_4w

Google confirms that it's just over 3 years old, so it may have been a bad idea to try and implement it. Can someone tell me how to get back to a working system, preferably with 96x96 DPI settings?

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LEGOManiac
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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#1

Please provide the output of the following diagnostic commands:

uname -a
lsb_release -crid
whoami
sudo dmidecode -t 1
sudo lshw -C display
dpkg -l | grep nvidia
sudo dpkg --audit
ls -l /etc/X11/xorg.*

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LEGOManiac (bzflaglegomaniac) said : 		#2

Thanks Manfred, but I've solved it.

After googleing around for things that trigger emergency mode, I noticed that there was a significant number of reports that this was triggered by failed attempts to mount file systems. This got me thinking about what I had been doing earlier.

The previous day, without rebooting, I had attempted to get my Garmin Forerunner 205 GPS watch to be readable by the Viking mapping application and to do so I had found a post from someone who indicated they had it working. I went back and found the original post from a working PC and confirmed that, in their last step, they tried to mount the watch to the file system, which, at the time, I thought was odd since the watch really just communicates as a serial device, but I blindly followed instructions anyway. The instructions didn't work and I went on to other things like the DPI problem the next day.

When I went back and removed the attempted mounting of the watch to the file system, everything went back to normal.

It's a damning indictment of linux, unfortunately. Adding a watch to a PC shouldn't bring the operating system to it's knees. A simple "unable to mount usb:garmin" should have sufficed with the rest of the OS getting on with it's life. I've lost hours over something that shouldn't have warranted anything more than an error message.

Thanks for offering to help.