Nvidia driver fails to load after an upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

Well, I guess it was too early for me for an upgrade but I was waiting restlessly for an upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version, Intrepid Ibex. The upgrade went fine but guess what, my X server failed to load NVIDIA drivers once it booted up. I could get into Safe Graphics mode.. but it was certainly not what I should have.

I had to refer so many blogs and docs to get this working.. I am posting that here so that anyone else having the same issue might find this useful.

• Boot with Xorg server default configuration first.
• Open up Synaptic and remove every installed package having the name "nvidia"
• Reboot again (this is a must)
• Install these Nvidia packages except "nvidia-xconfig" package (which got the bug)

nvidia-glx-177
nvidia-*-modaliases
nvidia-kernel
nvidia-kernel-common
nvidia-177-kernel-source
nvidia-settings

• Reboot again
• Run sudo nvidia-xconfig
• Restart X server.

From many blogs and forums, many have said that this corrected their issue.. but unfortunately, not mine.. I checked the Xorg.log and could see the line that the file "libglx.so" was missing due to some reason. Then I got a suggestion from another blog to link the file libglx.so.169.12 to libglx.so.

# sudo -s
# cd /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions
# ln -s libglx.so.169.12 libglx.so
# init 6

That worked! And, I became another happy Intrepid Ibex user :-)

PS: This bug might have fixed with the latest updates so, I also recommend doing a complete update before trying these steps!