Nadia+Nvidia=No good?

[Guilden_NL]

I have been trying to install the NVidia drivers on Nadia for a week with no success. During that time, I've read nearly every post in these forums and have Googled 93.7% of all Mint posts on the 'Net (Joking) but have yet to see a single person declare that they have Nvidia working with Nadia (Mint 14) Since I have a new Ultrabook, I came back to Mint to give it a try again, but am fairly put off by the approach Clem and team have taken with the video portion. Out of the box without the Nvidia drivers, Mint is quite a way back from my Ubuntu systems which are all running 14.10 (Quantal Quetzal). I have over ten systems with most, if not all of them having Nvidia cards and there wasn't a hiccup ***upgrading*** (another point I disagree with Clem on) from 12.04.

Can anyone confirm of a working system with Nvidia drivers on Nadia?

Sorry if I seem negative about Mint; if I were, I wouldn't have come back after a year or so away. Every distro has its own weak points and Ubuntu isn't flawless. Right now, the lack of smoothly integrating Nvidia drivers seems to be a big issue with Nadia, and I didn't see much focus on it from the development team during testing if many posts across the 'Net are truly indicative.

The bottom line is this is my primary work machine and I have to get a working distro on it today. I'd love to break through this issue with Mint so I can investigate Mint more deeply when I have time. But business is business and time is money. So I will be making a decision in the next six hours. Mint 14 or Ubuntu 12.10 most likely with LXDM, but may give KDE another try since it's been three years since I ran it on a personal system. Definitely NO Unity! My Ultrabook is a dual boot with Windows 8 and that GUI causes me to curse 3.8 times per minute. (Not Joking)

Thanks for any pointers anyone here can supply. I like the helpful attitude of these forums.

[Freek]

NVIDIA drivers work perfectly over here on Nadia! (304.43, 304.64 and 310.19)

[Guilden_NL]

NVIDIA drivers work perfectly over here on Nadia! (304.43, 304.64 and 310.19)

And what method did you use to install them? What HW are you running?

I am specifically trying to understand what in Nadia causes a blank screen after sudo /etc/init.d/mdm stop command is issued and how to work around it. And again, this is not a mismatched tty problem where alt+ctrl+f1 or f2 or f3... brings me back to the correct tty session, as I am not getting to a tty session at all.

[Freek]

I installed from the default Ubuntu repos first by going to the software properties and installing Nvidia-Current. And reboot afterwards.
As that version was a bit outdated I ugraded it using the Ubuntu-X team PPA
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings
(or just do a dist upgrade)
and reboot.

A week later I upgraded it to 310.19 by downloading the driver and installing manually (ctrl+alt+f1 (which doesnt works for you?) -> login as root -> $ killall mdm -> $ sh ./NVIDIA.. (This will ask you a few things, say yes for dkms and nvidia-settings) -> blacklist nouveau ($ nano /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics.conf with this text in it:
blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
blacklist nvidia-173
blacklist nvidia-96
. -> reboot

I got an Nvidia GTX 550 Ti as videocard

EDIT: fixed a typo at the blacklisting part

[Guilden_NL]

Freek, You took a slightly different route than I did, so I will give it a try.
Thank you for outlining the way you did it.

[Guilden_NL]

Freek,
Thanks again, your approach took me much further. Once I got the kernel updated, upon reboot Nadia ignored the Nvidia drivers and reverted back to the lowest default. I fiddled around with several possible issues and didn't find any.

I am well past my personally imposed deadline, so am wiping the Linux drive and will install 12.10 Kubuntu instead. The worst case is if that chokes on the NVidia drivers, I'll drop back to 12.04 and upgrade. Upgrading works every time for me, something that Clem claims is bad Juju. I'll leave him with his thoughts, while I get back to work making money.

Once again, I appreciate your time spent outlining the path that worked for you. I wish it had for me.

Met vriendelijke groeten,
Guilden_NL

[Guilden_NL]

New information, and I am going to give this a try: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=118694