"the system is running in low graphics mode" screen comes up when powering up

Hi ,
what is your graphics card and what drivers you use ? Do you remember if you installed any additional driver for your card ?

If you can , give these results (open a terminal with CTRL+ALT+T keys combo and paste bellow commands)

~$ lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 vga

~$ lsb_release -rcd ; uname -r

~$ dpkg -l | grep -ie fglrx -ie nvidia

Thanks

00:10.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation C73 [GeForce 7100 / nForce 630i] [10de:07e1] (rev a2)
 Subsystem: Biostar Microtech Int'l Corp Device [1565:1407]
 Kernel driver in use: nvidia

Description: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS
Release: 12.04
Codename: precise
3.2.0-32-generic-pae

ii nvidia-common 1:0.2.44.2 Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
ii nvidia-current 295.40-0ubuntu1.1 NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module and VDPAU library
ii nvidia-settings 295.33-0ubuntu1 Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver

Try

~$ sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*

~$ sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

~$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

~$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

~$ sudo reboot

Is it OK now ?

Thanks

first command showed a lot on the screen.
second command showed:
rm: cannot remove `/etc/X11/xorg.conf': No such file or directory

OK , is not necessary to have this file. Proceed .

went through them all and the secon to last command didn't seem to do anything. After the reboot the screen makes some little flashes when changing from one screen to the next but it went through the boot process without showing the low graphics message.

Lets see if you removed correctly the nvidia driver

~$ dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia

Thanks

ii nvidia-common 1:0.2.44.2 Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
john@john-desktop:~$

One thing I'd like to mention is I'm running on ubuntu 2D before this switch my new 12.4 operating system was all buged up with no tool bar and sometimes showing a screen blank except for a band of pixle noise. So now after your fix the problem is still all these little flashes of stuff especially when the screen is changing.

when I'm on certain sites like youtube the flashes are constant and are a flash of the current screen image shifted sideways six inches or about half the screen, example: I can see the toolbar flashing in the middle of the screen for split seconds when running youtube videos. Is there a way to fix this or go back to the way it was before?

I entered the command you provided in #7 and the response is shown in #8,

thank you for your help thus far

I am still getting ghost images everywhere

I am getting flashes of misplaced images everywhere when I run video and even with non video pages. I hope I didn't confuse things with comment #9 that was an old problem I was talking about, I just thought that may have some relavence to this problem but probably not, I'm a novice to all this, please help me if you can the problem of getting logged in is fixed but this problem with the flashing images makes viewing any video horrible.

Thank you

Hi,

lets install a newest driver trough PPA .

Open a terminal and do

~$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
~$ sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
~$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
~$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
~$ sudo nvidia-xconfig

Then reboot and see.

Thanks

on the last command I got this:

WARNING: Unable to locate/open X configuration file.

New X configuration file written to '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'

This is normal...

Reboot cross hands and we will see. :-)

Happy happy, joy joy. Problem Solved.

The problem with the flashing images went away but the problem with the error page reading "The system is running in low graphics mode" has returned with a vengence. Usually after a few reboot trys it goes away but this time it took me many trys and sometimes shows a text screen. So I'm back to the original problem.

Try this command please

~$ echo 'nvidia' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

and then reboot .

Thanks

That worked well to solve the problem, however now sometimes when I log in to my desktop the file folder icons are missing and when I try to open foxfire the screen flashes but it never opens, seems like its trying to and even will say the name of my homepage sometimes at the top black line but there's nothing below just my desktop image with no browser opened so I have to reboot till the folders appear and then I can open foxfire. This actually started happening after the commands in #13 if I'm correct.

Hi ,
This is probably a problem for another question. You can try to reset your settings .
Commands I gave you in 13th answer , updated-upgraded your driver for graphics card.

If now run in terminal this command

~$ apt-cache policy nvidia-current

you will see that the installed driver is : 304.64-0ubuntu1~precise~xup1

That is the newest driver you can get , of course there is another PPA with more new driver , but I considered as too risky.

As I said , if your screen resolution is OK now , you can close this question (sovled by answer) and then open a new.
Also you can link this question to the new.

But before , you can try these 2 things

1) ~$ unity --reset

After above command done , you can reboot or logout - login.

2) To reset your system to the primary state (ALL your configurations will be LOST)

~$ rm -rf .compiz* .gconf* .config/dconf/ .config/compiz* .mozilla/

Reboot your system.

Thanks

Thank you for your help, I had to make a second attempt to log in today but that's ok I guess it's a lot to ask to be bug free. If my dog has one flea I'm not going to give him a flea dip. I'll just leave things as is for now and be happy with the progress rather than risk more challenging bugs.

Nickth ------->https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/218729

can u help me here