[CLUG] Ubuntu fails install on nVidia Geforce4

[Peter Flynn]

I need to upgrade one of my systems from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 and thence 
to 9.04 (and maybe 9.10).

The native upgrade tool warned me that 8.10 and later didn't support my 
crappy old nVidia Geforce4 card, only the much later ones, but the 
change docs said it would use the old nv driver (the one installed with 
8.04, and working fine)...which is all I wanted.

They lied. It went right ahead and installed the new driver, and 
promptly hangs the moment you get to the login screen, requiring a cold 
boot. Unsurprisingly, the Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD also refuses to run, for 
the identical reason.

I've done the usual digging, but almost the only docs I can turn up are 
for people with newer nVidia cards wanting to upgrade. I want the 
reverse. One or two pages have suggestions about reverting, but they all 
assume that you have a (possibly suboptimal) working system to start with.

All I can do right now is a single-user boot, and of course there is no 
network connection in single-user mode, so I can't apt-get the required 
tools to follow the instructions. To make it worse, Ubuntu makes no 
distinction between runlevels 2/3/4/5, so I can't boot a console-mode 
system with a net connection.

I did download the updated nVidia driver package from nvidia.com, but it 
won't execute in single-user mode because some of the system daemons 
won't execute in that mode. In any case, I don't really want them: I 
want the existing (OSS) nv driver, which I already know works.

I did manage to purge aptitude of all packages containing .*nvidia.* 
(and their dependencies) so I believe I am now untainted, but before I 
try to locate and manually install the linux-headers, build-essential, 
etc .debs, has anyone any bright suggestions about how to coerce the 
system into loading the nv driver? The problem is that I don't know what 
it's called, or where it lives, or what to put in /etc/modload.d to make 
it load at boot time.

I did download the Fedora 11 Live CD, which loads and runs perfectly 
(presumably it has better graphics-card handling than Ubuntu), so I 
guess I could switch to that. I originally ditched Fedora and the 6/7/8 
level because the packages it used were hopelessly out of date, and 
because rpm didn't handle dependencies properly. Has this changed any? 
Is it worth making the switch or will I be going backwards?

In other news, how about some beer some evening? :-)

///Peter