ran ubuntu updates, now Nvidia driver not recognized
 

Dear all,

I am running ubuntu on a fairly standard PC box; processor is an Athalon 2500.

Ubutnu had been running very well and consistently; I had few complaints (aside for the sorta uneven foreign language support...but I digress).

I have been running the automatic updates (for nearly everything as it is offered), and after one of the more recent ones, it appears that my system no longer recognizes the Nvidia drivers I had been using....thus, X is now suddendly not fucntional.

Getting error messages galaore.

I'm not sure what happened, but I am guessing that one of the apps I auto-updated is somehow responsible and the Xorg11 file has not been adjusted.

I thought that Ubuntu was "idiot-proof" & the auto updates could not cause this sort of problem.

Is there anything I can do to salvage this (I can only access my Linux partition via command-line now)?

Or, is a total re-install necessary.

What should I do so I don't have to do this again?

Thanks,

-Dan

It's Linux, so a total reinstall is never (or almost) necessary. Try reinstalling the drivers when you reach the command line:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

And see if that helps...

Good luck!

That seems to have done it. Thanks!

Any idea what may have caused the Nvidia driver to be reset like that?

I had been updating as suggested by the "auto-update" feature in GNOME; was surprised that doing that could have caused this sort of error.

(running KDE at the moment, does not seem to be an equivalent "auto-update" feature)

No problems. I'm happy it helped :). Well, I've been testing Ubuntu for a while now and I did not have this problem yet. My guess would be that your kernel got updated, so Nvidia drivers were lost. Or something just got wrong and nvidia modules stopped to be loaded, for some reason. It's difficult to track those things, even looking at your log files :)

Cheers!

the nvidia drivers are very kernel dependent I have to reinstall them every time I recompile my kernel even though it's the same version if you upgrade the kernel that would break them for sure. I recommend the drivers off the nvidia page it comes with an installer that will install and even recompile the drivers if necessary.