Can not get rid of too new NVIDIA driver from initrd

I run kernel 3.5.0-27-generic on Ubuntu 12.10 _{(Pretzlyquantumbear!?)}

Somehow, I have installed Nvidia driver 310.32, and X11 will not start unless I at each boot go and run make install in nvidia-current-updates-304.88.

How do I get the correct driver, 304.88, into the initrd?

I have tried update-initramfs -u to no avail.

It gets kind of old to do, at each reboot:

• Hold Shift to GRUB menu appears
• Select Special boot
• Select Rescue
• Enter root shell
• remount -n -o remount,rw /
• cd /usr/src/nvidia-current-updates-304.88 && make install
• logout
• Select resume boot

1 Answer

It seems from here you have two mixed drivers installed:

• 310.X installed manually (with the installer from nVidia website);
• nvidia-current-updates from Ubuntu repos.

First of all you will need to uninstall the 310 driver. If you installed it from a .run file downloaded from nVidia website, you can do that using:

sudo sh /path/to/NVIDIA-Linux-<version>.run --uninstall

After this you can install some driver from the default repositories. If you need to use a 310 driver you can install the experimental one:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-experimental-310

despite being named "experimental" I used it for some time and had found no problems at all.

Or you can stay with the 304 driver you already have:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall nvidia-current-updates

If after rebooting you still need to compile the driver before each startup, check the following:

• Check you have dkms installed: sudo apt-get install dkms;
• Check you have the kernel headers needed to compile the module: sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
• Run sudo update-initramfs -u and watch for warnings/errors.