Today I got a new video card because it looks like the old one I had was going bad. I hope that was not my KVM, although we'll see when it gets hot again, whether the video goes bouncy again or not... If not, then the old card is good for the trash (although it works in console mode just fine!)

So I got a new card. My old one was a NVidia GT 220. Fairly old model. Yes.

The new card is an NVidia GT 630 (to be precise: Asus GT630-SL-2GD3-L.)

When I tried to start X11, I saw an error (really quick) and the system did not come up. Looking closer into the matter, I could see that the NVidia driver did not want to load. I tried different things as metioned on different blogs (a bit like my page here) and nothing really worked until I finally noticed one blog that mentioned an on the edge version. (at this time, it was something like 333... Look for the xorg-edgers PPA)

My specific error was: nvidia_304.ko No such device. Wow! 30 some versions behind. I could see it by probing:

sudo modprobe nvidia

I'm not too sure why, but it looks like they don't upgrade that driver. If you had driver 304, you keep driver 304. Period (rather strange if you ask me though).

Looking at the output of:

apt-cache search nvidia

I noticed version 310 and 319 available as is in Ubuntu (to get the newest version ever, you've got to use a PPA and you're kind of on your own...) So I installed version 319.

sudo apt-get install nvidia-319

WARNING: I have done this upgrade from the console, NOT from X11.

This will remove the old driver and install the new one.

Btw, I determined that 304 was not compatible because it writes so in the logs:

May  3 23:34:58 halk kernel: [ 1054.184485] NVRM: The NVIDIA GPU 0000:01:00.0 (PCI ID: 10de:1284)
May  3 23:34:58 halk kernel: [ 1054.184485] NVRM: installed in this system is not supported by the 304.88
May  3 23:34:58 halk kernel: [ 1054.184485] NVRM: NVIDIA Linux driver release.  Please see 'Appendix
May  3 23:34:58 halk kernel: [ 1054.184485] NVRM: A - Supported NVIDIA GPU Products' in this release's
May  3 23:34:58 halk kernel: [ 1054.184485] NVRM: README, available on the Linux driver download page
May  3 23:34:58 halk kernel: [ 1054.184485] NVRM: at www.nvidia.com.
May  3 23:34:58 halk kernel: [ 1054.184557] nvidia: probe of 0000:01:00.0 failed with error -1
May  3 23:34:58 halk kernel: [ 1054.184573] NVRM: The NVIDIA probe routine failed for 1 device(s).
May  3 23:34:58 halk kernel: [ 1054.184574] NVRM: None of the NVIDIA graphics adapters were initialized!

As we can see: not supported by 304.88

Me who thought I had the latest of everything!

P.S. I have been upgrading my system since 10.04 or so... thus I had archaic things since present here!