My desktop computer has dual monitor and an nvidia graphics card. I didn't manage to make the nvidia drivers work with the previous release so I was using the default drivers, which worked well enough for me since I didn't use the computer for fancy graphics or games. But when I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 I had problems with the display.
On the first startup, the monitors froze after logging in. I could only see the desktop background, that's all. There were no menus, no mouse pointer, nothing. Just the background image. I restarted a couple of times in ubuntu and in the other OS, Windows 7, but whenever I logged into Ubuntu I could only see the background image.
The first thing I did was to load the recovery version, and select the option to repair broken packages. The system didn't report anything special: no packages were found broken, so nothing was done. And again, after logging in, I could only see the background image.
Next I tried to login in with the failsafe display. Login was successful but the display behaved in a very strange manner. The monitor on the left had a black screen and the mouse pointer, whereas the monitor on the right had the desktop contents. To click on an item on the monitor on the right I had to use the mouse on the monitor on the left and predict where I was clicking... a very strange setup and very frustrating!
So I disconnected one monitor and restarted again. Now mouse and desktop were in the one monitor but there were no window decorations so I could not move or resize the windows. And it wasn't displaying the new "unity" desktop graphics but the classic one.
I tried several options. First of all I logged in again, this time asking to re-configure the graphic display (this is an option I saw when logging in on the failsafe session), but again the windows had no decorations and the desktop had the classic setup instead of the "unity" setup.
Finally I asked to use the generic display when logging in with the failsafe session and I managed to have the "unity" graphics. I asked to have the new graphic setting permanent, plugged the second monitor, and logged in again. The "unity" graphics appeared the contents of the two monitors were replicated. I opened the monitor manager and I selected the "extended desktop" option. Now everything was displayed as I wanted! I was so excited to see it apparently working and I was so late for dinner that I went home without checking whether the windows had decorations... I'll find out tomorrow Monday.
Yesterday Saturday I upgraded the laptop. During the upgrade the system reported errors with the xorg package so expected the worse. And true, after restarting the system would not even show the login page. Instead, the monitor showed a mix of colourful pixels.
The first thing I did was to select the option to repair broken packages in the recovery session, and to my relief it reported that some packages were repaired. Yet after restarting the monitor still showed the mix of colourful pixels in apparent random distribution. Next I selected the option to reconfigure the graphics but again, nothing interesting happened.
Next I selected the option to use the generic display, and now I could log in and see the desktop. Success! The windows had decorations, but the desktop setup was the classic, not the "unity" setup, because a message said that the laptop didn't have the hardware to run unity. I couldn't believe that since the laptop has an nvidia card which is supposed to be powerful enough. I opened the "restricted drivers" interface but it didn't show the nvidia driver there. I searched in synaptics package manager and I found several drivers, but they could not be installed because the source was not enabled. So I enabled the source and opened the "restricted drivers" interface. Now I could see the recommended nvidia drivers there, great! I selected the recommended one, and after re-starting I could see the unity interface.
Success! now I can use the laptop, and hopefully the desktop at my office works too.
The next thing is to get used to the unity interface. So far it doesn't look as useful as the classic one so I may end up switching to the classic one but let's give it a few more days.
