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All was well and then my installed NVidia drivers disappeared after a reboot. I am back to only one monitor and a resolution of 1024x768. I had 2 monitors available and with higher resolution.

Now I'm sure I can figure out how to install the Nvidia drivers et al since I figured it out in the first place. Ive just never had to do it after doing it already and having it disappear after a reboot, so Im asking the community:

  1. Is this normal?
  2. Best way to proceed to avoid it again.

I had several reboots where the driver stayed put. Things that may have changed is:

  1. I add a work space icon on the panel area at top and was playing with that, switching workspace etc.

  2. thee was the red warning icon on the panel, something about the cache didnt match something, so I did an apt-get update and then rebooted, and viola!

any help appreciated.

im on: Xubuntu 14.04 ASUS 750 Ti 16GB ram AMD black

Norman Bird
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  • How did you install Nvidia drivers? – Pilot6 Jun 13 '15 at 14:08
  • sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-334.21.run – Norman Bird Jun 13 '15 at 15:42
  • As an update I ran that command again and it walked me through installing the NVidia driver again and it is back to normal after the reinstall. I just wonder what caused the fail and if this is normal for this to happen from time to time and to reinstall? I got the driver from the ASUS site – Norman Bird Jun 13 '15 at 15:44

1 Answers1

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This problem happens when you install Nvidia drivers using .run files downloaded from Nvidia site. This is a wrong way to install drivers.

After each kernel upgrade you will have black screen or bad resolution.

The correct way is to install drivers from Ubuntu repositories or ppa.

You could install drivers by running

 sudo apt-get install nvidia-331

But first you need to uninstall the driver you have already.

sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-334.21.run --uninstall

As an option you can install latest driver from xorg-edgers ppa.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-346
sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa

I recommend to remove one driver before install another, because sometimes some packages do not install when they are still running.

Full removal of Nvidia proprietary drivers can be done by

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
Pilot6
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    Thanks, but help me understand why the -331? How do you know 331? the latest from NVidia appears to be 334 no? – Norman Bird Jun 13 '15 at 16:58
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    331 because this version is in Ubuntu repositories. Why do you tnink latest is 334? Support of it was dropped. 331 is LTS. Latest stable is 346. You can install it from xorg-edgers. I will Update my answer. – Pilot6 Jun 13 '15 at 17:03
  • i got the 334 from the numbers in the driver i got from ASUS is all. This was very helpful. I just installed the 331 your way and all seems fine. Are you saying i may have the latest and bettter version if I add and use the Xorg install way? – Norman Bird Jun 13 '15 at 17:10
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    You can see which latest version is released for your card at nvidia.com site. I do not know how better is 346 compared to 331, but it is a little faster. I use it with 550 Ti. But sometimes there are conflicts, so run first sudo apt-get purge nvidia* to remove one driver before install another. – Pilot6 Jun 13 '15 at 17:13