Ubuntu 12.04 with Nvidia Quadro FX card running Nvidia 173 driver is broken...very limited usability!
Older machine, Soyo motherboard with 2600 AMD processor, 2 gig ram. Nvidia Quadro FX (5 series) video card.
500 gig hard disk upgraded from very good running Lucid Lynx to Precise Pangolin by the standard upgrade process: Broken! The kernel seems to run correctly but the video it horrible and very limited! After upgrade the next boot gave me the black screen of death. Tinkered around with it, finally got it to run KDE safe mode, Gnome safe mode, would not run Unity at all in any mode. Program crashes were frequent, tried mostly with Pan newsreader and internet browsers Chromium and Firefox. They were crashing so frequently that I didn't want to try anything more system intensive figuring it was a guaranteed crash. And the strangest thing was that my wireless keyboard and mouse (Logitech K350 combo) would not work on reboot for 3 to 5 minutes, making login changes or even logging in impossible for several minutes, then it would start working on it's own.
At this point I gave up.....
Installed a 40 gig drive as primary and did a fresh install from a Precise live CD. Aha! The live CD seemed to work well so the install had to be good, right? Wrong!!!! Now Precise boots to the login screen every time, no problem! Keyboard or mouse still do not work, and will not come up on their own. I can unplug the USB dongle after the login screen comes up and the inputs start working but it is still impossible to use recovery or safe mode without actually plugging in a standard, wired (not USB) keyboard. The shift + key will not work either.
After tinkering around with Nvidia drivers I finally got the Nvidia 173 driver to work, sort of. Though login options are listed as Gnome Classic, Gnome without effects, KDE, Unity, and Unity 2d, the only window managers that will work is Gnome without effects and Unity 2d. Of the two Unity 2d seems the most stable but neither work very well. KDE will only come up in a black screen, as does Unity 3d. Gnome Classic opens in a nice screen but without any header bar or any way to do anything. There is no way to log off, change anything, open any files, etc. The only thing that appears is a curser and a beautiful picture on the monitor. Under Unity 2d or Gnome any program that is opened will load just about to the point of loading data, then crash. Firefox and Thunderbird are the most stable, actually staying up about 50% of the time. Chromium or pan will crash at least 4 times out of 5....
I have tried Nvida current= drivers. Really bad news!! They don't work! Problems run from screen opening in 640x480 mode to really wierd resolutions to not working at all. I have had the most consistent luck with the newest Nvidia 173 driver.
If I understand this correctly there is a problem between the newest X11 manager released with Precise and the Nvidia drivers for the older cards. But what I know is that I had a very stable system with Lucid and now I have a system that is pretty much unusable. How can I get the reliability back that I had with Lucid??? Please help!
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