[ale] Upgrading to 9.10 hosed my system

[JK]

Ryan Marshall wrote:

> I had the exact same issue last night while trying to switch over to the 
> binary nVidia drivers.
> 
> If I understand correctly, it seems like the X server is constantly 
> crashing and reloading.  On mine, the hard drive light was flashing in 
> sync with the screen flicker.
> 
> Anyway, I rebooted it, brought it up into recovery mode, did a 
> dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg out of habit and then ran the .run from 
> the nVidia driver package that I had downloaded after the Ubuntu 
> automated install failed repeatedly.  Follow the steps in the .run file 
> and got a beautiful composited desktop on next reboot. 


That looks like *exactly* what I was seeing - I, too, noticed that the
HD light and the screen flicker seemed sync'd.  The crash-and-respawn X
behavior totally explains that, *and* the keyboard weirdness too.

I'm using the onboard video on my Asus M3N78 MB, which is in fact
nVidia.  I'll give your suggestion a try when I get back home tomorrow.

Many many thanks,

-- JK