No Desktop After Install

[halw]

Installed 11.10 on Dell Inspiron 5150 last night after successfully testing w/live cd.

When booting from hd everything looked good until it cam time for the desktop to show up. Black screen, reboot, try again, same issue.

Has anyone seen this before? What I ended up doing, for the time being, was install another distro, which is working at present.

System has 2G ram a dedicated nvidia 5200 gpu, duel boot with win xp on 250 Gb hd.

Didn't even think to go to terminal and do a startx.

[halw]

Re: No Desktop After Install

No ideas eh?

[halw]

Re: No Desktop After Install

Personally I would've either tried to see something from a terminal (CTRL+ALT+F4), tried to boot from the recovery mode or reinstalled, a reinstall is only some 20 minutes away.
But before a reinstall I would double check the md5 hash of my download and CD or USB drive.

Thanks. I may try to reinstall and see what happens. BTW, hash was good. My suspicion is the nvidia driver in 11.10 is too new for the gpu and I'll have to find a way to load an older one.

[dibl]

Re: No Desktop After Install

System has 2G ram a dedicated nvidia 5200 gpu, duel boot with win xp on 250 Gb hd.

For that GPU you need to be using the 173.14.31 driver, as listed here.

System > Additional Drivers (aka jockey-kde) should have detected it and installed the correct driver -- you should be able to see which driver it is offering.

[Penguinclaw]

Re: No Desktop After Install

As far as I know the first video driver that gets installed is the Vesa one.
It's only after the first boot you typically install the nVidia driver.

Yes I am certain this is the case. It looks like something went wrong during install especially as it works in liveCd mode. I can't remember off the top of my head if Kubuntu offers it, but try "Alternative install", or whatever it's called. It should be available in the boot screen of the livecd. This is the alternative to the gui install but seems to be much better at setting up the hardware! Don't be scared of the slightly arcane look You use TAB to move around the screen, space bar to select and enter to move to the next screen. Take your time as you don't want to muck up your XP install and make sure you have a back up of all your data.

Hope this helps

[Guest]

Re: No Desktop After Install

I had the same problem - fine desktop when booting the live CD - no desktop after install.
The solution: Tick off "Proprietary drivers" and "Update during Install" when installing - that forces the installation to be similar to live CD. Then after successful installation I enabled Proprietary drivers and updated the graphics driver and my nVidia FX1200 worked fine

[halw]

Re: No Desktop After Install

Thanks to all for the suggestions.

Followed advice and re-installed without updates, etc. System booted to desktop but acted a little wonky. I then installed the nvidia 173.14.xx driver, rebooted. No desktop again.
Checked invidia web site and the 173.14 driver is supposed to be for the GeForce FX Go5200 GPU.

This is kind of weird. I may install latest LTS to see if that will work. If so, I then may try upgrading from there to 11.10.

[halw]

Re: No Desktop After Install

This is officially weird.

I installed 10.04 LTS and it is using 173.14.22. I have a desk top running 11.10 with an nvidia 6600gt cpu and it is using 173.14.30. Soooo, what changed between the two driver releases? One difference is what version of x-org is supported. Other than that I'm at a loss.

Only thing for sure is nvidia driver in oneiric hoses my display.