Ubuntu on Mac Driver for Nvidia C79 [GeForce 9400M]

Question

I am running 12.04 on Macbook 5,1.

lshw -C display gives the following output:

*-display UNCLAIMED
    description: VGA compatible controller
    product: C79 [GeForce 9400M]
    vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
    physical id: 0
    bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
    version: b1
    width: 64 bits
    clock: 33MHz
    capabilities: pm msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list
    configuration: latency=0
    resources: memory:d2000000-d2ffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d1ffffff ioport:1000(size=128) memory:d3000000-d301ffff

I need help in figuring the correct driver for this GPU. When I tried activating the driver using Jockey, I get this error

Sorry, installation of this driver failed.

I have a 63kb jockey log dump which i can paste if needed.

Answer 1

Since I managed to figure it out, I will answer the question myself!

The driver we should install for this series of video cards is nvidia 304.XXX series.

I tried the following.

• remove anything related to nvidia using (I would advise caution!)

  sudo apt-get install --purge nvidia*
  

• you can do either of the two things below:

1: Install nvidia drivers from the nvidia site

• download the nvidia driver from the nvidia site: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
• reboot the system in safe mode and drop to root shell.

• make the filesystem writable:

  mount -o remount,rw / 
  

• run the downloaded nvidia driver installer

  sh NVIDIA*
  

• once the installer completes Do not do start the x server but reboot the system. If you start the x server there, ~/.Xauthority file gets created as root, and hence, further when you try to log in as a regular user, x crashes/restarts trying to access this file and UI wont start.

I had some issues with this method; I got an error indicating api-mismatch. I believe I had not fully removed all nvidia related packages earlier. The following method worked well in the end.

2: a slightly easier method is using the ubuntu-x-swat ppa.

• add the x-swat repository:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
  

• refresh the sources

  sudo apt-get update
  

• install the nvidia packages using this repository

  sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings
  

I had some troubles using add-apt-repository. Hence I added the following line in my sources list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main 

rest of the steps are the same as (2) above