Take the 2-minute tour ×

Please help! I am pretty "newb" to linux and have no idea what to do. I got the message "your system must reboot to complete updates" (or similar). After rebooting I am greeted with a giant login screen and my 2nd monitor isn't showing anymore.

After logging in, I can only see a part of my desktop -- one giant folder icon. I can right click on the desktop but gives me no option to change resolution or anything.

Any help would be wonderful.

PS: I am able to get a terminal window open. Luckily that ONE folder had a terminal shortcut I had put there. So if this can help troubleshoot, please advise.

EDIT 2: This got me back to Unity working and a nice resolution and both monitors:

 apt-get purge nvidia-current
 rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
 reboot now

Unfortunately, now I guess I don't have any HW accel for my graphics card? :(

share|improve this question
Do you have a laptop? Does it have nvidia optimus? –  Vítor Manfredini Dec 3 '12 at 20:27
No, it is a desktop. It is ASUS nVidia EN9600GT graphics card. –  aikeru Dec 3 '12 at 20:28
Do you have access to the screenshot utility? If not you can invoke it from the terminal with gnome-screenshot. It would be useful to see what your desktop looks like. –  Chris Wilson Dec 3 '12 at 21:17
Not much to see. Basically if you zoomed in on the desktop background and had one giant-size folder icon. Pretty sure it was in 640x480 resolution. Unity wouldn't come up and compiz would crash. –  aikeru Dec 3 '12 at 21:24

4 Answers 4

I am using Ubuntu under Oracle VirtualBox and same thing happened to me. Also I lost the mouse scroll abilites, etc.

What I did to fix the issue was re-installing the Guest Additions and all the functionality came back.

share|improve this answer
up vote 1 down vote accepted

Epilogue: Since it all seems to be working now, I should share what I did. Probably not the best way, but since I'm a newb I just went with what I can find. :)

  1. Downloaded latest driver for 64bit / Linux from nVidia site
  2. Download and install linux-headers-3.5.0-19-generic
  3. Open terminal, change directory to where the .run from nvidia is downloaded
  4. In terminal chmod +x ... the nvidia .run file
  5. Reboot into recovery and login to recovery terminal
  6. Run this command so nVidia script can write to stuff sudo mount -o remount,rw /
  7. Run the nVidia script itself sudo sh ./NVIDIA-...
  8. Ignore the first "... script failed..." error. Select option to allow it to blacklist, mostly "yes", "agree", etc.

I think that's everything. I didn't think of this, but had I not had the shortcut on my desktop to get to terminal, I could have just rebooted into recovery mode to get the terminal and while googling found a hotkey to get there too (CTRL + ALT + F1?).

After this everything seems to be working. I used sudo nvidia-settings from terminal to rearrange the physical location of my monitors properly.

EDIT: This happened again after I updated my system...

I ran this command that I found here:


...and then basically repeated the entire process.

share|improve this answer

You could also check out xrandr.

With no option gives you a list of available defaults.

Update with i.e.:

xrandr --output HDMI-0 --mode 1920x1080

share|improve this answer

I had a similar problem when I tried to remove my nVidia drivers.

You need to re-install ubuntu-desktop to get your normal screen back.

Refer here for complete information : How can I uninstall a nvidia driver completely ?

share|improve this answer
+1 for the help, even though I did not use this to get it fixed, still useful. –  aikeru Dec 4 '12 at 15:07

Your Answer


