Monday, September 17, 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 and nvidia video card

I have updated Ubuntu on Dell Vostro 460 from 10.04 to 12.04. The video driver had no problem when I activated the "version current" driver available in system additional drivers. Later I messed up the system when tried to install a driver from nvidia website. Lightdm failed to load, and I can only log into console mode. It can be fixed by forcing reinstall the nvidia-current package.
sudo apt-get --reinstall install nvidia-current
If this does not work, you might also try
sudo apt-get --reinstall install lightdm
A few days ago, Ubuntu updated its kernel. The lightdm loaded but the configuration was wrong. I realized I had to re-enable the additional drivers. A little surprise was the "version current" stopped working, while the "post-release update" worked. The other thing annoying me was the blue face problem of youtube flash video. The fix was described in this post. The most tricky part was that you can only turn off the hardware acceleration option when the video was in full-screen mode.