nVidia recently has released (May 2008) production quality device drivers for linux 64-bit systems. So if you have Ubuntu 64 bit installed with an nVidia card, download the latest driver from nVidia site.

1. Download 64 bit nVidia driver for Ubuntu. This driver supports the following cards,

• Quadro FX 3600M
• GeForce 9800 GX2
• GeForce 9800 GTX
• GeForce 9600 GT
• GeForce 9600 GSO
• GeForce 9500M GS
• GeForce 8400
• GeForce 8400 GS

2. In order to install the latest driver, it must be compiled for the kernel you have. For this you need development tools such as make and gcc installed. You will also require linux-headers package for your kernel version. Packages pkg-config and xserver-xorg-dev are also required.

3. Uninstall any existing nVidia drivers from your Ubuntu installation. This easier said than done. Following are some of the steps you can take to ensure that no obsolete nVidia drivers are used.

• Remove the package nvidia-glx from the system.
• Remove /etc/init.d/nvidia-glx and /etc/init.d/nvidia-kernel files.
• Remove linux-restricted-modules or linux-restricted-modules-common packages.
• Instead of disabling the above packages, you can edit /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules or /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common and add a line, DISABLED_MODULES=”nv nvidia_new”
• Delete /lib/linux-restricted-modules/.nvidia_new_installed file if it exists.

4. Ensure that the downloaded driver installer file NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.14.05-pkg2.run is executable. You can do this by,

Then invoke the installer using the command,

5. The installer can also make the required changes to X server configuration file. Select the required options and continue.

6. Reboot the system. If everything went well, you will see the nVidia logo during the display initialization!

During nVidia driver installation, I encountered a strange problem. Immediately after the driver installation, I was getting complete access to nVidia features and the driver was working. But once I restarted the machine, the display driver was changed and the nVidia features was no longer available. Also the available resolution was reduced. I traced this problem to the existence of generic nVidia drivers still present in the installation. Once I removed every trace of them and re-installed the driver, everything was working in perfect condition!