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…
- First, visit the Nvidia website and use the wizard to download the correct driver bundle for your card.
- Hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 to enter a console
- Uninstall the existing Nvidia drivers:
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-* - Move the old Xorg config out of the way:
sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.orig1 - Stop X:
sudo stop lightdm - 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.
- Reboot
All going well, you should now have working Nvidia drivers with two screen support!