Nvidia driver installed successfully, but not activated

Question

My Ubuntu 12.04 only shows up black screen when starting up some days ago suddenly. Since I can desktop through recovery mode (resume in recovery mode, and the resolution is wrong), I believe there's something wrong with my video card driver. So I go to nvidia's website, download the driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86-310.44.run, and installed it successfully.

Now, while I can get the following output with lspci | grep -i nvidia

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT215 [GeForce GT 335M] (rev a2)

the driver seems not to be activated.

When I start up NVIDIA X Server settings, it shows up a message box saying

You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run nvidia-xconfig as root), and restart the X server.

But I do run xnvidia-config successfully, and also reboot the system.

What's more, the "Additional Drivers" is blank, saying

No proprietary drivers are in use on this system

Could anybody give some hints on how to deal with this problem? Thanks a lot!

Solution

I was also facing the same problem. Now that you asked it, I wanted to fix in my computer as well. So here is how you do it.

EDIT: sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

sudo nvidia-xconfig. This will just create the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Next do

sudo software-properties-gtk

You should see something like this

Select Additional Drivers tab and select the latest NVIDIA driver as I have selected here.

Now reboot. This reboot might take a long time. No need to worry. If it takes more than 10 minutes with the black screen, even after rebooting, restart with Ctrl+Alt+Del or even hard reset (keep pressing the power button as long as needed). It should work properly now.

Comments

[dehiker]

As 13.04 has been released, and there had been some problems before I upgraded to 12.04, reinstalling my ubuntu seems to be a good idea to me, so, I did it. Really enjoy 13.04!

[Admin]

where do you download this 310 driver

[dehiker]

Thank you for your reply, thefourtheye! Sadly, "sudo software-properties-gtk" have no "additional driver" tab on my laptop

[gosalia]

I have updated my answer with the step to install nvidia drivers in Ubuntu way. Kindly do that as well.

[dehiker]

Sorry for replying so late. I installed ubuntu 13.04, so problems gone. Thank you for your reply!

[dehiker]

Sorry for being so late. I got my problems fixed with installing 13.04 after several days off. I will try your advice if problem occurred again in future. Thank you, GM-Script-Writer-62850!

[yop83]

What version of Ubuntu is that screenshot from? When I run sudo software-properties-gtk on my Ubuntu 12.04.x box, the screen does not have a tab labeled 'Additional Drivers'.