Error saving Nvidia X server settings on a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)
After a clean install of Ubuntu Karmic (9.10), on a box with an Nvidia card (1), went into "System" > "Administration" > "NVIDIA X server settings" and changed configuration to TwinView (I'm using dual monitors), which worked, but saving the configuration returned:
Failed to parse existing X config file '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'
Nothing further found in the logs. The solution was two-fold.
Firstly, running Nvidia config from the shell instead of the Administration menu, dumped a useful error to the screen, when attempting to save settings in the GUI:
$ sudo nvidia-settings
VALIDATION ERROR: Data incomplete in file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Undefined Device "(null)" referenced by Screen "Default Screen".
Secondly, now that I know that the problem is that nvidia-settings is upset with something in the existing config, one way to solve this is to just let nvidia-xconfig generate a new config.
$ sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
$ sudo nvidia-xconfig
WARNING: Unable to locate/open X configuration file.
New X configuration file written to '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'
A diff of the new xorg.conf against the backed up version, shows a bunch of new stuff was added along with TwinView options. Looks good to me. Now I reboot to confirm the new xorg.conf settings produce the result.
Yay, problem solved, on with my day.
(1) Specific model is:
$ sudo lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G84 [GeForce 8600 GT] (rev a1)
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