I just installed Ubuntu Jaunty on my Core-2 duo desktop machine. The install went fine, but I am doing CUDA work and need recent versions of the NVIDIA drivers. I downloaded the latest version for Intrepid (maybe that's my problem) version 185.18.08-beta. I cleared the various nvidia-glx files and restricted modules. Then I did a ctrl-alt-F1, logged in and "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop, got an OK, and then "sudo sh <driver_file_name>". Unfortunately I get "ERROR: You appear to be running an X server" message. I went back to an earlier driver (180.22) (which I successfully used in Intrepid) and tried again. It also fails in the same way. Is there any way of installing a recent nvidia driver in Jaunty?

do a "ps -uax | grep X" and kill the X process if there still is one. (kill -9 PID) replace PID by process number

Drivers must be compiled for each kernel version. This is handled in the Ubuntu repositories when kernels are updated. Intrepid and Jaunty use different versions of the kernel. If you want to use a driver version other than provided by Ubuntu you'll need to compile it.

Thanks serafean. It turned out I had two X servers running. However, I still couldn't get the installer to complete properly (complaints about glx), so in desperation I tried installing and running envyng. Fortunately envyng now supports driver 180.44 which is recent enough for my needs (this has never been the case in the past). Phew!

Now I have CUDA with Jaunty!