Tuesday, April 20, 2010

[wubi] X11 trouble during install

At work I have a computer with a Quadro FX. For some reason, the Wubi 9.10 install has trouble with it. The first reboot under Ubuntu is supposed to launch the install process. However, I was left with a blinking screen and a text console. After a bit of struggle, I was able to install the NVidia drivers:

0. sudo stop gdm
(in between two blinks!) This stops gdm and stops the painful blinking.
1. sudo apt-get install lynx
(a text based browser)
2. Launch lynx, navigate through NVidia website
3. Download the dirvers (AMD64 bits for 64 bits computers)
4. Install the drivers
5. Start gdm

After this the X server should start fine. However there is a catch: Ubuntu is not installed yet, in fact you are running in a virtual RAM disk. If you reboot at this stage, all changes are lost!
The trick is simply to launch 'ubiquity', and select the 'loop' partition as install partition. Then the install completes and you are ready to enjoy Ubuntu!

Hope this helps.