I had a video issue when I restarted my headless Ubuntu 7.10 file server a few days ago. (In case you’re curious, I was installing uShare, a UPnP/DLNA media streamer that’s compatible with the Xbox 360 and PS3).

For my particular problem, it seemed I was having a problem with the resolution of the video card not being supported by my monitor. Reconfiguring the xserver package should fix most video/display problems and unless you have a non-standard setup, it’s worth a try.

Step 1: Get to the Boot Menu

When your computer is booting, simply wait for the BIOS to load, then hit escape when you see a screen such as the figure.

Boot into the Recovery Mode

Step 2:

You should now be presented a menu with all the bootable operating envoriments available. Select the version of Linux that you wish to repair (make sure you’ve selected the one named (recovery mode) and press the enter key.

Choose Recovery Mode

The version of Ubuntu I was trying to fix on my actual server was Ubuntu 7.10, but on the VMware virtual machine I took screen shots from I’m running Ubuntu 8.04. They upgraded the ways to fix the video so I’ll cover the slightly more complex 7.10 method in Step 3a, and the simpler 8.04 method in Step 3b.

Step 3a: Reconfigure the xserver in Ubuntu 7.10

Now you should be booted into the bash as root at your home directory. (In other words, you should see something like [username]@[computer's host name]:[directory]#, or root@ubuntu-vmware:~#. Factoid of the day: the tilde, or ~, actually represents your home directory.)

Type in the following command and hit enter:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Run the xserver Recovery Command

If done correctly, you should be presented with the xserver reconfiguration tool which may look familiar if you did the alternate install. You can massively tweak your xserver using this utility. I left most of it black or the defaults except for setting the default resolution to the native resolution of my monitor.

Step 3b: Reconfigure the xserver in Ubuntu 8.04

Using Hardy Heron, it’s MUCH simpler to reconfigure the xserver as it comes with a new utility built to do just that.

Just like in step two you need to boot into the recovery mode of your operating system, but this time you’ll be presented with a menu like this:

You can now see that it now has options to resume booting as normal, login to a shell as root, or run the dpkg command to fix broken packages that may be preventing you from booting up. But we won’t need to run the dpkg command this time as it also provides a tool that will automagically reconfigure window server. It ran for about 5 - 10 seconds displaying the screen below, and brought me back to the menu above.

xfix Automatic xserver Repair Tool

Now you can choose resume normal boot and you should be able to login to Ubuntu and continue to rule the world! Or at least finish setting up the UPnP/DLNA on your file server.