Trouble shooting display Drivers

[shailesh_paranjpe]

I am using 64 bit kubuntu natty on HP pavilion DV6 with AMD processor. I have lost my display possibly due to driver problem and hence graphical userinterface is not available. I am trouble shooting through a terminal window.
I want to reinstall display driver files by either by installing directly from internet or through a usb drive.
I am connecting to inter net using usb mode switch and wv dial. Therefore when I connect to internet using wv dial from terminal, terminal window is not available for typing commands to download the driver files. therefore there no way to type sudo apt-get etc. command to download. Pl.explain if it is possible to download by opening another terminal window or some other method.
Alternatively if I download the driver files in a usb stick I do not know how to connect to the usb stick through a terminal window. What is the command for installing a driver from a usb through a terminal?
Pl. Explain both the methods as I am unable to use kubuntu until I instal the display driver files.
Thanks

[saurav]

Re: Trouble shooting display Drivers

After connecting to the Internet press Ctrl+Alt+F2 or Ctrl+Alt+F3 (up to F6) to get a secondary terminal. Then try whatever you want, like sudo apt-get, but I think you can also use dpkg or dpkg-reconfigure. For example, you can use sudo dpg-reconfigure <your driver package name> to reconfigure your driver. Also check the .xsession-errors file in your home directory for any specific errors that are occurring. You can use dpkg itself to perform advanced management tasks on your driver. For details see the man page for dpkg (man dpkg). In particular, you can use its purge option to completely erase the driver, and then re-install it. If you had installed an additional proprietary driver, simply uninstalling that driver may work because then it should fall back to the system's default open source driver. From the terminal you can also use the commands kdm or startx to try to start the graphics and see what happens.

As far as the USB drive is concerned, you should have an entry for it in your /dev directory, for example, /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc, etc. To use it you will have to mount it to another directory. For example, sudo mount /dev/<whatever> /mnt/mydisk. Then you can use the directory you mounted it to (like /mnt/mydisk in this example) to work with it, for example, ls /mnt/mydisk or cp /mnt/mydisk/myfile <wherever>, etc. Be sure to unmount the disk before removing it - sudo umount /dev/<whatever>.