Weird video behaviour

[Teunis]

Thinkpad W520 with triple boot, 13.10, 14.04 and Win7.
In the BIOS the video has been set to nVidia, not Intel.

After today's upgrades of 14.04 the computer surprisingly boots into Intel.

Booting into 13.10 still brings up the expected nVidia.

So I assume there's something in Grub that is able to override the BIOS.
Anyone with more knowledge on this subject and how I can fix it?

Edit:
On second thought, this might be the nouveau driver that has taken over, at the moment I'm updating 13.10 over a VERY bad hotel connection so I'll have a closer look in the morning.

[Teunis]

Yes it is the nouveau driver, so no unexpected BIOS modification.

The new Driver Manager does show nVidia 311.38 as installed but opening the NVIDIA X Server Settings shows a rather sparse window with nothing to set up...

At the same time and after a very short reprieve again the hotkeys stopped working.

As well the xorg.config was for the 3rd time disabled.

The only update that's been pending now for about 24 hrs is a 'linux-headers-generic'.
Could this be the reason a module like nVidia has not been updated?

[Teunis]

Hmm, tried to install via the Konsole:

Module build for the currently running kernel was skipped since the
kernel source for this kernel does not seem to be installed.

[Teunis]

OK, got nVidia loaded and working.

'Just' adding 'blacklist nouveau' to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf was not sufficent.

I found this page:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/u...il-nvidia.html
and successfully followed the bit about Nouveau & Nvidia conflicts like making the /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf file and adding 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset" ' to /etc/default/grub

I'm a bit puzzled I am so far the only one reporting this problem but the above remedy worked.

[Teunis]

In the mean time I've removed the /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf file and nVidia is still enabled.
In other words, the addition of nomodset to grub is what counts.

What does not work is the inclusion of xorg.conf what on these laptops enables the use of the screen brightness control keys and conky starts up underneath the task bar.

[Teunis]

Using nVidia I had never seen the boot splash with the (Plymouth) Kubuntu logo, it did start to show when nouveau was used.
And it remained after I did the nomodeset trick, even though this would land me in nVidia.

Until a few days (week?) ago when another update replaced the splash with the rolling start up logs.

Today and being back home on a decent connection, I removed nomodeset from grub and updated grub, the Kubuntu splash has reappeared and I still end up in nVidia.

So it seems the reason for the original problem has been fixed.

We'll probably know more after a future nVidia update...