SOLUTION SEVEN: SWITCH TO A BASIC GRAPHICS DRIVER
Many graphics problems, blank screens and desktop loading issues are caused by misconfigured, corrupt or buggy graphics drivers. Propriety graphics drivers such as those used by ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards can be especially troublesome.
The easiest way to fix a bad VGA driver is to disable the driver and to use a generic driver such as MESA or VESA. This can be done by recreating the xorg.conf file:
- Drop to a shell
- Stop your display manager as shown in table 1 of this guide e.g “sudo stop kdm” or “sudo stop gdm”
- Delete your xorg.conf filesudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- Paying attention to the capital X, recreate a default xorg.conf file withsudo Xorg -configure
- The new xorg.conf file will be in your home directory. Move it to /etc/X11/ withsudo mv ~/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- Restart your display manager with “sudo start kdm” or “sudo start gdm” etc…
- Access the graphical environment with Ctrl+Alt+F7
xorg.conf stores configuration settings for your display driver. Running the
Xorg -configure command causes Xorg to create an xorg.conf file that specifies the use of a generic graphics driver.
Once a generic driver is in use you should be able to load your desktop and install the propriety driver again. Hope that doing so fixes the original issue; if it does not you will need to reset to the generic MESA or VESA driver. If creating a new xorg.conf file does not fix your desktop then you will at least know that your desktop loading error is not necessarily related to your graphics driver.