total newbie here. My old XP box died last week; bought a used HP 6000 Pro with integrated VGA. Decided to go single boot Ubuntu, had a cd made for me. All was going well. Partitioned the disk as follows:
sda1: 32G primary swap
sda2: 32G primary / ext4
sda3: Extended
sda5: 8G logical /tmp
sda6: 28G logical /var
sda7: 100G logical /usr
sda8: 200G logical /home
sda4: 100G primary /dos
Installed standard from cd, then
sudo apt upgrade all
Then installed Synaptic, added multiverse and restricted repos, Cinnamon, gcc, g++, blender...
And there I hit a snag: blender refused to run withou a gpu. Now, I intended to buy a Radeon and a wide screen with FreeSynch, but I don't have the money yet (unemployed), so I figured why not move the videocard from the XP box.
I tried the card first, see if it would auto-detect. The card is 4.5" format; my new box is 3.5" format, so I had to bend some metal to get the card to plug in. The bios did detect it, and I changed IRQ5 from Intel VGA to Nvidia. Ubuntu was booting until user screen, then froze. So I figured it needed a driver. My old box is Dell Dimension 9200. I believe the videocard is Nvidia GT230 or GT250. Either way, the right package for the driver seemed to be 430.108, so I installed it, and all its dependencies.
When Synaptic finished I got a message that I had to fix something with resume. I had that problem before and managed it by fixing the UUID of my swap partition, sda1; but this time the number was correct. I checked fstab and panicked to see the order of my partitions changed, with comments sayin they were different during installation. I worked hard at restoring the original order of the partitions. Maybe it's not relevant? All the tutorials say fields are separated by a space or tab; nobody clarifies whether multiple spaces or tabs are acceptable. Are they? At the end of the day, I don't think I changed anything important, but when I try to boot with the video card I get a black screen regardless if I'm booting from disk or CD.
Without the videocard I can boot from install cd; but trying to boot from disk I see very fast text messages on the screen, the last of which I think mentions sda1, and then a black screen with a flashing cursor top left.
With the videocard in place, CTRL-ALT-F4 doesn't work for me. Tried it on two consecutive boots. The first boot I hit the 3 keys as the Ubuntu logo came on, and it showed a bit of VGA tex, then went black. Second time I booted it never got to the logo. After a millisecond flash of text it went black and the 3 keys do nothing. Now, without the videocard, the only diff the 3 keys make is going from logo directly to flashing cursor, instead of having to wait a few seconds. I noticed the heatsink on the gpu has a bit of play. I'm willing to give up on using blender. Just want it to work again
Sorry guys, I just couldn't take it anymore; I'm reinstalling. Sad, after a full week working on this install, but I was on the verge. This graphics card goes to the trash where it belongs. I can see that upgrading hardware in linux is Hell, so blender will have to wait until I can build a better PC and fresh install a distro on it.