Just trying to install Ubuntu on my laptop and can't get nvidia drivers to work. Have been googling and trying for a while, but since I am not used to Ubuntu I am not sure quite how to diagnose the problem, whether is a bug and should be attached, and plus a lot of the information on google seems quite old.

My laptop is a dell xps, with a 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 550M Graphics Card, which, according to here, http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-270.41.19-driver.html, should be supported.

I am trying to install Ubuntu Natty 11.04. First of all, the often mentioned System->Administration->Hardware drivers isn't there on my installation, there is however a System->Administration->Additional drivers. It shows only one entry, NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver. On the bottom it says "The driver is activated but not currently in use."

I have re-installed nvidia-current a few times, restart a few times, to no avail. System-Administration->Hardware yields "You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run nvidia-xconfig as root), and restart the X server."

Running nvidia-xconfig tells me that it can't find an xorg.conf, and is generating a new one. With that xorg.conf, the computer fails to start the X server back up again until I delete the xorg.conf again.

Xorg -configure returns a very strange xorg.conf with 5 screens.

Here some more output

florian@FloWorkLinux:~$ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p

Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".

Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".

Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".

Error: unable to create the OpenGL context

florian@FloWorkLinux:~$ sudo lshw -C display

*-display               

   description: VGA compatible controller

   product: nVidia Corporation

   vendor: nVidia Corporation

   physical id: 0

   bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0

   version: a1

   width: 64 bits

   clock: 33MHz

   capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom

   configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0

   resources: irq:16 memory:f0000000-f1ffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff 

memory:d0000000-d3ffffff ioport:4000(size=128) memory:f2000000-f207ffff

*-display

   description: VGA compatible controller

   product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller

   vendor: Intel Corporation

   physical id: 2

   bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0

   version: 09

   width: 64 bits

   clock: 33MHz

   capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom

   configuration: driver=i915 latency=0

   resources: irq:52 memory:f2400000-f27fffff memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:5000(size=64)

florian@FloWorkLinux:~$ lspci | grep nVidia

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 0dd6 (rev a1)

The bit of the generated xorg.conf that relates to nvidia is

Section "Device"

    Identifier     "Device0"

    Driver         "nvidia"

    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"

EndSection

Help appreciated, thanks