In the event that any of my fan(s) might be wondering, I am a goddamned genius. I may have broken X (oh, and BADLY!) in my refusal to wait for an update to Beryl (spoilt by my spinning desktop cube), but I also…fixed X. Yaaay! Not only did I fix it, but I removed my old Nvidia driver and installed the latest one while I was at it. I couldn’t get it to work before because I didn’t have the development files for Xorg, so although it could install the updated driver, it could not compile the the kernel module for it, resulting in a mismatch.

Since I forgot from the last time and cursed the air blue until it occurred to me, when Ubuntu drops to runlevel 3, GDM is still running, and you can’t install a graphics driver with GDM running. To stop it:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

I probably won’t have to do this again because Feisty will be out in April and I think it’s going to have binary drivers in it, but if I do:

– Need make and gcc

– Need the linux-headers package that matches the installed kernel (uname -a if I don’t know)

– Need the pkg-config and xserver-xorg-dev packages installed

– Must have removed nvidia-glx (with –purge) and ensure that the file /etc/init.d/nvidia-glx does not exist.

– For Ubuntu (not Debian), linux-restricted-modules must be uninstalled, or if there’s stuff you need in it (wireless), then edit /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules to disable the Nvidia modules (nvidia, nvidia_legacy). Do that with: DISABLED_MODULES=”nv”

Okay…brand spanking new driver, check. Wobbly windows, fold-y menus and spinning cube, check. Genius geek girl, check! Now to tend the blackworms and go find the kitchen under the water change mess I still haven’t cleaned up. At least I was able to leave X broken long enough to tend ID and the fish, but it really was bugging me! 🙂

P.S. Aaaaayyynd, if you expect Emerald to draw your window borders, don’t forget (as I just did) to add this to the Screen section of xorg.conf

# Enable 32-bit ARGB GLX Visuals
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”