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I have installed CUDA 6.5 in Ubuntu 14.04 and am using NVIDIA driver version 346.35 [Graphics Card NVIDIA GTX 960]. I have successfully compiled the sample codes that come with CUDA and they have been running perfectly. But today I did an auto update and after that Unity Desktop was running blank after login. I tried all suggestions given in the below post and it did not help me get back my desktop:

Ubuntu Desktop does not load

I also tried un-installing and re-installing lightdm, Ubuntu desktop, etc.... but nothing seems to work.

Most of the posts ask to purge everything related to NVIDIA and then reinstall NVIDIA driver again. Now for someone running CUDA it is my understanding that doing a purge on nvidia-* will remove the Nvidia driver as well as the CUDA installation, which would mean reinstalling everything all over again which is highly undesirable.

I have somehow managed to work around it by uninstalling the NVIDIA 346.35 driver and then reinstalling it again. But I am having to do this every time I update Ubuntu, which is again not handy at all. Can someone suggest a better solution which does not involve tinkering with the NVIDIA drivers or my CUDA installation?

To just unistall NVIDIA driver, I dropped to command console on login window by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 and ran the below command:

sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.35.run --uninstall

After it uninstalls run again:

sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.35.run

restart. This seems to have fixed the issue for now.

Community
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Sourav
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1 Answers1

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You've used a .run file which is out-of-scope for the automatic updates. Have a look here for more background information.

So you're stuck with manual updates of your .run file ad infinitum.

There is however another way to get the NVidia 346.35 on your system and that is to install the xorg.edgers PPA. As the xorg.edgers group ask not to give installation instructions directly without linking to their page, this is the best I can do for now…

If you don't know what a PPA is or need some guidance about rolling forward and backward of driver versions after reading their page, leave a comment below.

Community
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Fabby
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  • Hi Fabby, thanks for your reply. I looked up the PPA page, a little guidance will definitely go a long way, as I have an active project running in my system and I dont want to mess things. Thanks again for the help. – Sourav Feb 26 '15 at 00:29
  • 1/ Take a system back-up You've been promoted to user type 4. Report back when you've got one. I use CloneZilla LiveCD. Just your / should be fine, keep /home out of it. – Fabby Feb 26 '15 at 01:35
  • I got hold of a net-book and have installed Ubuntu on it. I can play around with it. What do I do next ? Apologies for the delay in the replying back. – Sourav Mar 01 '15 at 03:57
  • Remove the .run file with the command from your system with sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.35.run --uninstall then do a sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa Then sudo apt-get update to get the PPA's software list and then you're ready to install the 346 driver by: sudo apt-get install nvidia-346... :-) – Fabby Mar 01 '15 at 07:05