Saturday, May 26, 2007

Ubuntu, NVidia and Automatic updates

So you have your Ubuntu system up and running, you click the button to do an innocent software update and suddenly... Bye bye X! What happened?

Well, during my upgrade to Feisty I installed the NVidia drivers' packages and they were updated. And since for some reason Ubuntu's NVidia drivers still don't work, I lost my X! So, once again, it's back to w3m to download and install the NVidia drivers from NVidia's website...

This is easy to solve, but I would rather that it didn't happen again. So I removed the Ubuntu packages from my installation.

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-glx
sudo apt-get remove nvidia-kernel-common

After doing this you must reinstall the NVidia drivers, because removing these packages also deletes a bunch of required files. As a bonus, you win about 100Mb of free space. :-)

5 comments:

almamun said...

Hello.
I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy... 1st everything was ok..As soon as I installed updates the problem began. Resolution was poor without Nvidia detected. Again I need to ok from restricted device manager. Graphics improoved but resolution is no more than 800*600

kutuma said...

I'm also using Hardy right now, but I've downloaded the NVidia drivers from the NVidia website. I keep them in a folder so that every time there is an update (like the kernel update two days ago) I can easily reinstall them.

almamun said...

Would you pls tell me the links of those files..

almamun said...

Or I simply uninstall and reinstall the previous package?

kutuma said...

You can get your files from here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

Next, you must login in a text console (press [ctrl]-[alt]-F1) and kill X windows (sudo kill-9 gdm).

Finally, run the installer. If it says something about libc not being there, just get it (sudo apt-get install libc6-devel).

Disclaimer: I'm writing these commands by heart, so you may need to do some corrections...