I have a HP Pavilion laptop with an NVIDIA GPU. With each major upgrade of the Ubuntu OS I've had a battle getting the nvidia driver to behave, but each time I have managed it. A while ago I updated to 13.10, went through the usual dance, and got it working. A few days ago, however, I did a minor software update and now the graphics driver is completely hosed. After much fiddling its now got to the point where I'm completely stumped as to how to proceed. The repeatable sequence I can do is:

1. boot into kernel 3.11.0-15-generic


2. when it tries to boot X, the nvidia splash screen fails with lots of picture noise


3. A primitive dialog pops up to say that the system is running in low graphics mode. None of the options presented in that and subsequent dialogs seem to help.



4. I Ctl-Alt-F1 into the console and check that:

   
   
   

   sudo apt-get install nvidia-331

which seems to be the latest driver from nvidia.

I select it using:

sudo jockey-text -l

sudo jokey-text -e kmod:nvidia-331

Which runs fine. This doesn't load the module in however, so I force it:

sudo lsmod | grep nvidia

sudo modprobe nvidia_331

sudo lsmod | grep nvidia

and the last lsmod now shows the module is loaded with 0 users of it.

Then I run:

sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm start

This time X comes up with the nvidia splash screen, and then finally the usual ubuntu login screen. Logging into that does bring up my desktop, but without any of the unity trappings such as the icons in the left or the bar on the top or any display manager. A "System program problem detected" dialog pops up, but gives me no details as to what it actually is.

Then when I reboot, it's back to square one where the nvidia driver needs to be reset in jockey and modprobe'ed again - it's not retaining that information.

Clearly nvidia drivers are fragile at the best of times, but any help from people who might have been through this same pain would be greatly appreciated.