The last two times I have updated from the Software Updater, I have had to reinstall my graphics drivers and restart Unity

Question

The last two times I have updated from the Software Updater, I have had to reinstall my graphics drivers and restart Unity.

The first time it happened it took quite a long time for me to find out how to get everything back. I am unfamiliar with Ubuntu and unity and I'm wondering why I had to do this. Should I turn off Updates all together? Are there specific updates that I should avoid?

For complete reference. I will put what I did below to get everything back up and running. I don't know if all of it is necessary, but I know it gets me back to where I was if I do it this way:

1) The machine comes up with nothing but a bad resolution and a mouse pointer. So I kill the xserver by "ctrl + alt + F1"

2) I do the following so I can install the nvidia drivers again

• sudo service lightdm stop

• sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-319.23.run

3) I go through nvidia's rigamarole and reinstall everything

4) I restart and the resolution is clearly where it should be but I'm still missing Unity so I followed some instructions I found on this site

• menu bar and launcher missing in ubuntu 13.04

• dconf reset -f /org/compiz/

• unity --reset-icons &disown

5) The terminal I used to do step 4 obviously disappears but the unity bar never comes back up

6) That step 4 must do something funky to the metacity stuff cause I lose control over my terminal boxes so I run metacity and get them back

7) I restart my machine and everything is "near" back to normal (I lose all of my icons that I previously had on the launcher and gain some that I long ago got rid of)

So my main concern here is I don't want to do this every time the Software Updater has an update. Is this a common problem?

Answer 1

You certainly can use the nVidia .run files, IF you have Dynamic Kernel Module Support, dkms, installed before you start. It will make the driver rebuildable for a kernel upgrade.