Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with NVIDIA Quadro K1100M

Question

I use Ubuntu for testing WiFi networking hardware at my job. I recently had to replace the laptop that I was using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with a new laptop. It is an HP laptop with the NVIDIA Quadro K1100M on a 32 bit OS. It took me much tweaking to get it to work properly, but I was able to do it with installing the proper drivers and modules. The problem is that each time I get a Linux Kernel update, it causes a problem that I believe is related to XServer and the NVIDIA graphics card. I installed the closed source drivers from NVIDIA, and ran the Xserver config tool from NVIDIA (/usr/bin/nvidia-xconfig). That seemed to work with the original install, and the first update that I received. With the last linux image update (linux-image-3.16.0-38-generic), it once again crashed my system. I am forced to use the grub menu to boot the previous version, as I cannot seem to fix it this time.

What can I do to prevent future kernel updates from causing this problem? I had previously tried making the xorg.conf file immutable, thinking if I prevented the configuration from being overwritten it would stop this from happening, but that did nothing.

Answer 1

This problem is caused by a wrong way of installing Nvidia drivers. You probably downloaded a .run file form Nvidia site. In this case the driver is not properly installed and will need to be re-installed every time you update kernel.

The correct way of installing Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu is to go to System Settings -> Software & Updates -> Additional Drivers. Alternative way is to use apt-get.

But if you already installed drivers from a .run file, then you need to uninstall them first by running that file again with "--uninstall" parameter.