Kubuntu 12.04 - nVidia 331Drivers - OpenGL issue

[orasis]

Hello everyone,
I hope this is the right section to post this, I have searched google but didn't really find anyone having this problem.

Some days ago the nVidia 331 drivers appeared in the "Additional Drivers" and moved on to activate them once they are marked as "Recommended". Well what happens is that after reboot OpenGL crashes, it takes forever to enter to the desktop, sometimes it does not even enter with only a black screen. When it does enter, all effects are disabled and everything is a mess. If I go to System Settings > Desktop Effects, OpenGL is disabled because of failure. If I re-enable it the whole thing just happens again.
I switched back to 304 that works excellent, but I wanted to mention this problem somewhere once nobody seems to have posted something about it.

This is the x64 version of Kubuntu, no Gnome or other desktop enviroment installed, I've never tweaked nvidia drivers or needed to manually install them.
I got an i7 inside with 8GB ram and nVidia GTX 560 Ti (by the way, with the 304 drivers, Steam gives better fps in games than on windows7 on the same machine).

Thanks everyone, if you need more info that I forgot just let me know.
George

[Guest]

I am in the same situation :-(

[orasis]

Some days ago there was an nvidia driver update that did not solve the problem. I am still on the 304 ones.
@nadavkav I think none cares, as none has replied.

[GreyGeek]

The 331 driver was the culprit that blew my 14.04 Alpha installation apart. I had to manually remove it so that the kernel would not load the Nvidia kernel driver and then reboot to ket the i915 driver as the only ko in the active mods. Then, manually install and lock the previous Nividia driver that worked. Synaptic has better tools for this than Muon.

[Guest]

I was not brave enough to downgrade (as suggested on several forums)
http://askubuntu.com/questions/53364...talled-kernels
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1036788

but read somewhere that the last nvidia update, probably, left the opengl broken.
so I decided to recompile the nvidia kernel module. I use dkms.
So I made some research "how to recompile nvidia using dkms" and here goes the solution

(backup, first!)

  mkdir /root/backup_dkms
  cp -r /var/lib/dkms/* /root/backup_dkms 
  ls /root/backup_dkms/

(clear current driver)

rm -rf /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-3*

(tried...)

ls /var/lib/initramfs-tools | sudo xargs -n1 /usr/lib/dkms/dkms_autoinstaller start

(which did not work)
(then, I tried...)

dkms install nvidia-331 -v 331.20 -k 3.12.0-031200rc7-generic

(which worked!)

[orasis]

oh thanks for that information guys !
@GreyGeek yeah I got to install synaptic as well, I haven't on this system yet but I also think synaptic is a great tool for such things. Though, it feels like once the 331 is broken as mentioned, I am (for now) fine where I am with the 304 ones on a 12.04 kubuntu.
@nadavkav all I did to downgrade was to activalte the 304 ones, luckily they were there (using the Additional Drivers window). So in my case I didn't need any console typing.

As far as I know nvidia is making changes for good on the linux drivers since Steam started all this but they proved to me that their drivers may break a system and even burn up GPUs even on windows drivers. So if feels like they are not testing their drivers so well before release which is rediculous.

[orasis]

Issues, but not as bad, I face on 14.04 lts x64.