Looks like I effed up my Ubuntu install

[Shmalls]

Ok, so I am noob.
I was installing an ati driver for the "Mobility Radeon 9600" in my laptop running Ubuntu 7.04. Every thing worked fine. I activated the driver in the restricted hardware driver list and re-started, still worked fine. Then I realized that I no longer had any of the 3D stuff, the liquid windows and the 3D cube and such. So I then decided to disable the driver in the aforementioned list and restarted. oops, it crashed. it says:

"Failed to start the X server (your graphical interface). It is likely that it is not set up correctly. Would you like to view the X server output to diagnose the proble?"

Not looking forward to starting over.
thanks for any help
~David

 

[SSP]

I didnt stick around till ubuntu feisty, and I never used ati drivers in linux but I think I can at least allow you to get back to x.

When it ask to view the output, just say no, login, then edit your xorg.conf file (in /etc/X11/), and change the ati driver from 'fglrx' to the open source one, which I think is 'radeon' (could be ati, but i think radeon is the correct one).

If you're not sure how to do this, after logging in;

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

find the part that say "Section Device 'fglrx'" and change fglrx to radeon

press ctrl+O then enter to write the file. ctrl+X to exit

reboot and it 'should' use the default ati drivers instead of the 3d accelerated ones. After that, I hope someone who use ati with xgl/aiglx can assist you getting it back to normal, but until then, you'd at least have a working x environment.

 

[Shmalls]

I was able to restore the previous version of xorg.conf, that corrected the problem.
thank you for the input though
~David

 

[child of wonder]

www.ubuntuguide.org

 

[Alone]

If you edit with gedit, there's a backup with a tilde at the end (/etc/X11/xorg.conf~) unless you turned that feature off. Of course, there's always dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.

 

[xtknight]

The best command is probably:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

This way, it asks you a much lower amount of questions but fixes your X. You can type it in the recovery mode or in the normal mode in a virtual console.