Nouveau is a attempt to replace the NVIDIA obfuscated driver and put it in the kernel. No modeset tells the kernel, not to attempt to set the screenmode. Nouveau would have to do that. However, my experience with an NVIDIA 690 is that nouveau starts to panic at my card and the boot system hangs. A sign to me, that nouveau is still not mature, because the 690 has been around for a while now.

About the driver: nouveau is a kernel component that you can not deactivate through ' additional drivers / restricted drivers' because these drivers are the ones you use for X windows.

what I did, is I added NOMODESET in the list of kernel parameters in grub, permanently. When the system boots the kernel checks this setting and reacts accordingly.

For Ubuntu 12.04 the setting is stored in /etc/default/grub . You add it to the line titled GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. If the line says:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

you would change it to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

After adding NOMODESET to this line you should run sudo update-grub to allow grub2 to see it the next time you boot.

APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) is the system that Ubuntu uses to manage all of the software installed on a system. It allows you to “pin” a package to a certain version, so that it won’t be updated when you the Update Manager runs.

To pin your kernel packages, first you must determine what version your kernel is. One way to do this is to open the Synaptic Package Manager in System > Administration.

Type in “linux-generic” in the Quick search text field and hit enter.

Make a note of the number listed in the “Installed Version” column. We’ll use it in the next step.

Next, we need to edit the file /etc/apt/preferences. Open it by pressing Alt+F2 to bring up the Run Application window and entering in:

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/preferences

This will open up a gedit window. Most likely the window will be blank, unless you’ve played around with APT before.

In the window, type in the following, replacing the version number with the version number you found in the Synaptic Package Manager.

Package: linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic linux-restricted-modules-generic
Pin: version <insert version here>
Pin-Priority: 1001

Save the file and close gedit. If you open the Update Manager, you should see that the Linux kernel updates are now hidden!

Source

Blocking packages with APT/DPKG

Remember the package name of your kernel from above.

Open a terminal and run:

sudo -s

And hit enter.

Enter your password for sudo:

echo kernel_package_name hold | dpkg --set-selections

Replace kernel_package_name with the name of the kernel you want to pin.

Now run:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

To remove pin from Apt/Dpkg:

Open a terminal

sudo -s
echo kernel_package install | dpkg --set-selections

Replace kernel_package with the package you want to pin.

Now run:

sudo apt-get update &&  sudo apt-get upgrade

Source

What you're trying to do is called pinning. The sources I gave you above, have the essentials on what you must do to accomplish your tasks in hand.