Clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 - Screen goes black after login, but mouse works

Solution 1:

Turns out unity does not support my video card. Seems there are a number of older NVIDIA cards that one would think would work with unity, but do not because they are blacklisted. For more info on this is found here.

I tested my video card with unity:

/usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p

returned:

OpenGL vendor string:   NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce FX 5700LE/AGP/SSE2
OpenGL version string:  2.1.2 NVIDIA 173.14.39

Not software rendered:    yes
Not blacklisted:          no
GLX fbconfig:             yes
GLX texture from pixmap:  yes
GL npot or rect textures: yes
GL vertex program:        yes
GL fragment program:      yes
GL vertex buffer object:  yes
GL framebuffer object:    yes
GL version is 1.4+:       yes

Unity 3D supported:       no

I repeated this with both nouveau or nvidia-173, unity was not supported on either.

I found the following work arounds:

GNOME

I was able to run Ubuntu 14.04 with gnome instead of unity.

@tty (Ctrl + Alt + F1):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-session-flashback

reboot

@login prompt:

Click the image on the upper right of the name
Select: GNOME Flashback (Metacity)

Lubuntu or Xubuntu

An alternative to Unity and GNOME is Lubuntu or Xubuntu.

Just for the record, I did not try either of these since I was able to run Ubuntu with gnome.

Unity-2d on Ubuntu 14.04?

In Ubuntu 12.04, I remember running Unity-2d because I was not able to run unity. In Ubuntu 12.04, we were able to select Unity-2d at the login screen similar to the way that gnome is selected in the text above.

I was able to install unity-2d @ a tty: sudo apt-get install unity-2d However, I was not able switch from unity to unity-2d. I read some place that unity defaults to unity-2d when it can not run, apparently that did not work in my case.