I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Some months ago I installed Amnesia - The Dark Descent which uses 3D graphics and therefore refused to run using Nouveau. So, after having no luck using the Additional Drivers application, I downloaded the appropriate NVIDIA driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-310.32.run) from the NVIDIA website. I installed the driver with a little help from this page:
However, the screen resolution was far too low. I tried quite a few different solutions I found online involving xrandr and xorg.conf but they had no effect. In the end I removed xorg.conf which fixed the resolution problem but Amnesia still didn't work and all my other games that previously worked fine would not even start up. Plus whenever I logged into Ubuntu the screen would flash grey for two seconds, which it didn't do before, and the Unity toolbar scrolls down instead of having the extra icons bunched together at the bottom.
So I gave up and left it as it was for a while and eventually I downloaded an update that somehow restored things to the way they were before (games worked again, Unity toolbar was back to normal and no more grey flash).
Later I tried again with a slightly more up to date NVIDIA driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-319.23.run), still with no success and with the same problems as before. I tried a few more solutions but ultimately decided that the NVIDIA driver is more trouble than it's worth (I'll have to download the Windows version of Amnesia), so I tried to completely remove it and restore Nouveau using this method:
How can I uninstall a nvidia driver completely ?
This still had no effect. Now, when I type
dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia
nvidia-common is all that's left but the games still won't run (BIT.TRIP BEAT throws up a message saying "Fatal Error - failed to create SDL window: Couldn't find matching GLX visual" but the rest do nothing when I click on the icons), the screen still flashes grey on login and I still have to scroll down the Unity bar.
So, how can I get my games up and running again? Does anyone know what the update was that fixed things before (there were A LOT of updates at the time) and how I can re-install that update? Are there still other NVIDIA files I need to remove?
Thank you for your time.
-- Richard