Installing latest nvidia on Lucid

This is for those planning to use latest nvidia drivers from nvidia's site. Its usually in form of run file. Why would one use this when Ubuntu provides repositories for nvidia drivers on their own. Well to me its matter of getting latest, Lucid seems to have addressed this issue somewhat by providing with nvidia-current which installs a slightly older 195.36.15 driver but for those wishing to stay current or on hardware like GT400 etc. which needs latest nvidia forceware, this is the only way. There are ppa's as well like Brandon Sniders nvidia-vdpau or Javenyard's one but then you are dependent on the person updating it and also most ppa's carry extra stuff which you may or may not wish to install.

For Lucid we have to make mods due to it having nouveau driver by default which conflicts with nvidia installer.


The installation credit goes solely to Andy_Boy at Ubuntu forums. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1467074

For basics start with

sudo apt-get install build-essential
then do a gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

add these following entries to the bottom of the page that has opened up, make sure to leave a blank space from the last entry before copy pasting these.



blacklist nouveau
blacklist rivafb
blacklist nvidiafb
blacklist rivatv

Save the file and then do a sudo apt-get –purge remove nvidia*

This will remove all nvidia drivers and other related stuff installed by Ubuntu.

Reboot and you will be in low graphics mode, don't panic, select exit to console login.

Make sure your nvidia driver is in HOME folder and nowhere else as this makes it far easier.

Login to terminal

Do a sudo service gdm stop

then do a sudo sh NVIDIA and hit tab, the driver is automatically picked up.

Say yes to all prompts and when done do a sudo reboot, you will be right back to your desktop with shiny new nvidia driver.

For those intending to run x32 programs under x64 like Google Earth etc. its recommended that you install the program before installing this driver as the symlings to libglso is picked up correctly. If you install afterwards, just remove nvidia driver by going into console and reboot and reinstall again and Google Earth will pick up the symlink.