Tuesday, June 07, 2011

nVidia driver seems to be easily broken in Natty

Yesterday I posted that I was able to get the Unity (3D) session working well in Ubuntu Natty by using a legacy driver for my nVidia GeForce 7300 LE graphics card.
However, today I installed an upgraded version of Emerald using this guide as the repo version of Emerald gave a segfault as I reported earlier for LinuxMint.
The procedure involves using the commands

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

After I rebooted, however, to get Emerald working, no Unity Launcher nor 3D effects appeared.
Removing Emerald (actually, I used a script with a 20 second script to start Emerald) from StartUp Applications did not cause either to return.
What did work, however, was reinstalling the nVidia driver using the nVidia Installer as I described yesterday.
During the reinstall I received an error message, which did not appear yesterday, stating :
File /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so is not a symbolic link
However, the message did include an OK button, which after I clicked it, allowed the re-install to continue to a successful completion.
As for an explanation, this thread (post #16) and this one (post #10) point to an update of xserver-xorg-core causing an overwrite of the /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so symlink.
Although I can't be totally sure that the update and upgrade commands I used in the Emerald upgrade as no "Show Date Created" option seems to exist for files in Ubuntu, for the moment it certainly sounds like the only viable possibility.
This link also provides some possibilities for re-establishing the symlink after an update of xserver-xorg-core (post #6) or preventing the symlink from being overwritten during the xserver-xorg-core update (post #9) although I didn't try either of them.

No comments:

Post a Comment