I had this problem with a wubi install. Ubuntu would highly pester me and drop to command shell (that of grub) without showing the boot options (Why and who knows??). I every time will have to boot by manually entering boot options (really painful). So I did this. I entered the boot command of the “recovery console” manually by finding it out from grub.cfg through the Live CD. After getting to the repair option I selected the option “Update GRUB”.

This one seems to be a really famous problem for most folks in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. So I had it too. The problem was on the initrd file. It is a kernel related file needed for booting. So i did a simple thing. I replaced initrd.img file of my kernel version with “initrd.lz” file from the Ubuntu LiveCD and edited my grub.cfg file (equivalent of menu.lst in older Ubuntu releases), to boot using initrd.

Nvidia Proprietary Drivers need nvidia-settings to set screen resolution and change other settings. In previous versions of Ubuntu and in other distros to make them permanent (used in every session) you click the “Save to X configuration file”. From Karmic on there is no xorg.conf by default!

As a result, nvidia-settings is not able to save the settings and every time I logged in I had  to change the resolution (Phew!!!). Then Sathya helped me. He gave me a link from Ubuntu Forums{#aptureLink_MZsWFB9Cv4}. Then I did the following to fix the problem:

In Karmic the restart Xserver shortcut is disabled by default. Enable it thus: In the menu, go to System->Preferences->Keyboard (not Keyboard Shortcuts) Go to Layouts tab, click Layout options Expand “Key sequence to kill the X server”. Check “Ctrl+Alt+Backspace” You’re Done.