There I was, sitting having my breakfast this morning (tea and some porridge before work) when suddenly my KDE4 crashed. I mean crashed, corrupt looking screen, and needed a reboot.
PC reboots and I’m given the evil flashing-prompt-of-death ™. No login screen.
After much tinkering and typing of commands I eventually gets a God awful, 640×480 login screen! Not only that, but my ENTIRE glorious desktop is 640×480! What the HELL…?!
After work I sat down to fix the resolution glitch. It seemed as though my Kubuntu 8.04 had lost sight of my nVidia drivers. After several attempts to rectify the problem I eventually uninstalled the nVidia drivers and installed envyng which seemed to do the job, but I still had to manually alter the xorg.conf file to add some monitor info.
My question is this: what happened to ‘Bullet Proof X’? My X certainly wasn’t bullet proof!
I bothered spending the two hours getting the problem fixed because I love Kubuntu. But, it’s episodes like this that move people away from Linux and over too the dark side.
Had I not had my EEE PC and wireless internet I would have been utterly lost… 
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Tags: 640x480, bullet, bulletproofx, kubuntu, Linux, nvidia, proof, resolution, ubuntu, x, xorg, xorg.conf, xserver
August 27th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
You could have uninstalled the nvidia driver completely, deleted your xorg.conf, and xorg should use the nv driver to give you an acceptable desktop perhaps?
These days xorg is pretty damn good at figuring out a basic config if you don’t give it an xorg.conf.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:46 am
You need to write an editorial suggesting that the Ubuntu guys bring back dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. I mean the REAL xserver-xorg. Not this little fake one that Hardy has.
August 28th, 2008 at 8:43 am
@ Andrew - Absolutely, as nearly ALL of the potential answers in UbuntuForums tell you to use the now defunct dpkg-reconfigure command. To get it to really work you need to add -phigh. Even then it doesn’t always work…
@ Alan - The basic xorg.conf was giving my a choice of two modes, 320×240 or 640×480. And that was even after I’d installed EnvyNG. Only way to get anything larger was to manually add the monitor refresh info (which I was kinda guessing)
October 3rd, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I ran an auto package update and the same thing happened. I reloaded my nvidia by following the instructions on the nvidia site. It was the ONLY way I could get my recapture my screen from the horrors of 640×480 basic LCD.
You are absolutely right when you say that things like this turn people away from Linux. HELL it might as well be Windoze!
October 6th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
The main problem is nVidia, and their dumbass drivers.