Of Acer Aspire Revo and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I have been running one of my Myth frontends on an Acer Aspire Revo for a while now. When I first got it, I loaded it up with Gentoo, which was my favorite distro at the time. Since then, I have set up several other frontends using Mythbuntu, all of which speak to my backend still running on Gentoo.

Since all of my frontends except one were running Mythbuntu, I decided to do myself a favor, and convert the last one to Mythbuntu as I upgraded toward the final 0.23 release of Myth. It seemed like it would be a pretty straight forward thing to do, but it turns out, it isn't so straight forward.

I managed to get the system to install reasonably pain free. I selected my usual options during install, such as using the proprietary NVidia drivers, instead of the open source ones. (Mainly because I need VDPAU, or else these low power machines won't be able to keep up.) Following the final reboot, I saw some text on the screen about a failure to load something related to the NForce chipset, quickly followed by a blank screen. But, not just any blank screen, the blank screen my TV gives when there is either no signal, or an invalid signal on the input.

Needless to say, this was annoying. After running some nmap to chase down the DHCP address given to this machine, I was able to log in. While looking through a "ps xaf" output, I noticed that there was a process called "zenity" running, that seemed to be trying to display an error message about Ubuntu running in low graphics mode. Googling around found that this usually happens when the driver installed is incorrect, or improperly configured.

A quick "lsmod" showed that the expected nvidia kernel module wasn't running! At this point, it seemed pretty clear why the configuration didn't work! Looking through the available apt packages, I couldn't locate the proprietary nvidia drivers. (Or, at least they weren't where I expected them to be.)

A bit more Googling around came across this web site : http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-install-nvidia-drivers-manually-on-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx.html

So, what does it all mean? Darn good question. I am far from an expert on the subject, but it would seem that the latest version of Ubuntu doesn't have a way to install the NVidia driver without going through the old method of downloading it directly from NVidia, and doing the work yourself.

What I can say, however, is once I followed the instructions from the link above, my machine booted right up in to X, and started working as I would have expected.