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So, I recently got a notification that my Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) was no longer going to be supported, so I had to perform an upgrade. I didn’t have time to move to 14.04, so I just did the HWE upgrade.

Unfortunately when I rebooted, I no longer had 3D support, and worse, my twin monitor setup was no longer supported (or rather, both monitors were active, but showed the same thing!).

Diagnosis

I am rocking a NVIDIA GeForce GT 610, which, although it’s a basic card, doesn’t seem to be supported very well by Ubuntu’s native Nvidia drivers. When I ran nvidia-detector, no cards were found.

Since my card was working before, I figured it was probably just a driver problem.

Solution

The solution I used for this was to update the Nvidia drivers to use the Nvidia proprietary drivers. Here’s how…

  1. First, visit the Nvidia website and use the wizard to download the correct driver bundle for your card.
  2. Hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 to enter a console
  3. Uninstall the existing Nvidia drivers: sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*
  4. Move the old Xorg config out of the way: sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.orig1
  5. Stop X: sudo stop lightdm
  6. Run the NVidia installer (Note, you may need to reboot and re-run steps 5 & 6, as the installer may have to disable some kernel modules). Save yourself a headache, and be sure to build the DKMS module, so that changes aren’t lost when ubuntu updates itself.
  7. Reboot

All going well, you should now have working Nvidia drivers with two screen support!

One thought on “Fixing Nvidia on Ubuntu 12.04’s latest HWE on a GT 610”

  1. So, after I fixed the two screen problem I was having with my Ubuntu setup, I started getting an odd flickering.
    This flickering didn’t affect the whole screen, rather it seemed to be something to do with window repainting, and it became even worse after I updated to 14.04.
    I run a slightly non-traditional configuration, in that I run Gnome2 fallback rather than Gnome3 or Unity, therefore this probably won’t effect a lot of people, and is probably why it persists.
    After a bit of digging, I discovered that this is actually a compiz issue. Here’s a summary of the fix:
    Fixing the flicker
    Install the compiz settings manager: apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
    Scroll down to “Workarounds” in the “Utility” section:

    Select “Force full screen redraws (buffer swap) on repaint”:

    Once this is done, your windows should repaint as normal.


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