Downgrade my current NVidia driver to a specific version

Question

Recently my NVidia driver was updated from 270.41.06-0ubuntu1 to 270.41.06-0ubuntu1.1, but I have troubles with it. Is there an easy way to rollback with aptitude to the version before?

Solution

Create /etc/apt/preferences with content

Package: nvidia-current
Pin: version 270.41.06-0ubuntu1
Pin-Priority: 1001

and then run sudo aptitude install nvidia-current.

You should also be able to do just

sudo aptitude install nvidia-current=270.41.06-0ubuntu1

but then it will ask you to upgrade this on every future dist-upgrade.

Comments

[dan-lee]

Oh yeah thank you very much Daniel, that was it. I can't tell you how happy you made me :)! (By the way it was nvidia-current)

[Daniel Andersson]

@DanLee: Good with the package name feedback. I'll update the post accordingly. nvidia-glx is the name on Debian Sid, which will probably propagate to Ubuntu sooner or later. The Ubuntu machines I had access to showed nvidia-current as well, but they are 10.04 and 10.10 respectively, so I thought maybe it had changed.