I am running Ubuntu 12.10 on an Asus G75V laptop with nvidia gforce GTX 660M. I first run 12.04 on this machine and was able to install nvidia_current drivers from swat ppa:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
This worked in 12.04 and after rebooting the machine my graphics where working properly. After upgrade to 12.10 however, the machine boots into a low resolution desktop which I can not really interact with. I suspect this is due to the driver not being loaded properly. To fix this, I have to switch to ctrl+alt+F1
session and manually load the nvidia_current module and restart the desktop manager:
sudo modprobe nvidia_current
sudo service lightdm restart
Now everything works fine again. However, I would like not to have to do this every time I reboot the machine. I also dont want to hack an script to do this on load. Basically, if things are setup currectly, the nvidia_current driver which is installed should load. How can I make sure nvidia_current driver module loads properly when system starts?
Edit: I tried removing the ppa and installing nvidia-current-update
as was suggested in the comments. However, I still face the same problem. The only difference is that now when I restart I come back to desktop with this distorted image:
It appears that nvidia module is not being loaded properly when system boots, even though working drivers are installed.
Again, to work around this issue I can switch to ctrl+alt+F1
session and login. Then I can run this code to get the driver loaded and the desktop back:
sudo modprobe nvidia_current_updates
sudo service lightdm restart
I thought it may be that nvidia_current_updates is somehow being blacklisted somewhere or that nouveau driver is not being blacklisted. So I went into /etc/modprobe.d directory and take a look around. I could not find any evidence of that. Here is the content of nvidia-graphic-drivers.conf
which seems relevant:
:/etc/modprobe.d$ cat nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf
# This file was installed by nvidia-current-updates
# Do not edit this file manually
blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
blacklist nvidia-173
blacklist nvidia-96
blacklist nvidia-current
blacklist nvidia-173-updates
blacklist nvidia-96-updates
alias nvidia nvidia_current_updates
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off
Best Answer
Since the
ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
PPA currently doesn't have any packages for Quantal, I'd suggest removing it.Then install the recommended or experimental Nvidia driver. You can make sure the module loads by adding it to /etc/modules.