I recently purchased a new Dell XPS 14, I was dual booting Windows 8 with Ubuntu 12.10. Initially, I had problems with getting the NVidia drivers to work correctly. When I reboot after the driver installation the Ubuntu dash doesn't appear, just the wallpaper. I'm aware that this is a current issue and I have read other peoples solutions and still can't successfully get the proprietary drivers to work. I've tried installing Linux-source and Linux-headers and reinstalling the drivers several times. No solution that I could find seemed to have worked. Here is a list of the hardware I'm running.
Intel core i7 3517U CPU
4 GB DDR3 RAM
NVidia GeForce 630M 1GB dedicated graphics
500GB HDD with 32GB mSATA
I am really not sure why this doesn't work, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Best Answer
I looked up your laptop, it seems to support the low-power Intel graphics as well as the high-power nvidia graphics.
You can confirm if your laptop has both intel and nvidia by running
lspci | grep VGATry purging all nvidia stuff and then forcing the intel driver to be used? Afterwards, install nvidia-331 (or latest) and Bumblebee using Xorg-Edgers PPA.
Bumblebee is a program that allows you to invoke the nvidia driver only for applications of your choosing, otherwise the intel driver runs as default.
More info on my answer here: Lenovo Y510P and SLI GT750M not working