Completely remove/reinstall Nvidia drivers

[rlwa32]

On my LM 18.1 system equipped with a GeForce 9500GS using nvidia drivers everything worked fine. The fan on the Nvidia card failed and the card was replace with a different GeForce card that also failed. Before the second card failed the driver manager was used to install the recommended drivers for that card. The system now contains a GeForce 8500GT and again driver manager was used to install the recommended drivers for that card -- Nvidia-340. The system is running the 4.4 series kernel.

However, the system has begun to experience erratic problems that were not evident before the fan on the original video card failed. For example, Firefox crashes related to the video card, Virtualbox 5.1 has which previously worked flawlessly started to experience crashes, and video problems have surfaced in virtual machines where there were previously none.

I would like to completely remove any nvidia drivers/files on the system and then reinstall the recommended nvidia drivers with driver manager to eliminate the possibility that somehow remnants from the other nvidia drivers are causing the current problems.

I suspect that the first step in the process should be to use driver manager to select the nouveau driver. However, I don't know exactly which commands to use to completely purge all nvidia related files from the system and if anything needs to be manually removed. After the system has been cleansed I assume I would use driver manager to reinstall the appropriate Nvidia drivers.

How should I proceed?

[kyphi]

That was bad luck with the nvidia cards and I wonder what the cause might be.

The Driver Manager should be sufficient to remove or install any drivers. You can also check in Synaptic to see which nvidia driver is installed and which nvidia drivers are available.

To remove nvidia drivers completely you can use this command sudo aptitude purge ~nnvidia

My laptop uses the nouveau driver which works perfectly. My desktop uses the nvidia 387.34 driver which also works perfectly.

Generally it is good policy to stick with the driver that works without "upgrading" to later versions. Later versions particularly cater for new additions in graphics cards.

[Prsman]

I would like to do this also but for a different reason. I have two apps which cause seg faults in the nvidia driver. I just installed XFCE, had Cinnamon.
Exact same problem. This is the way I want install the driver from Nvidia's website. My current driver is from Synaptic and works great other than the seg faults.
So first go to TTY1 with ctrl + alt + F1. Then login, and use these commands. I hope this will be painless.

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sudo service xfwm4 stop

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sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

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chmod +x -v ~/Software/NVIDIA-Linux-*.run

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sudo rm -v /etc/X11/xorg.conf

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sudo sh ~/Software/NVIDIA-Linux-*.run

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sudo nvidia-xconfig

Doe anyone see a problem with these steps? Thanks

[Laurent85]

Doe anyone see a problem with these steps? Thanks

Installing directly driver from Nvidia website this way is not recommended if you don't want to face unexpected issues with package manager. Open a new topic regarding your problem and post inxi -Fxz command output from a terminal.