Nvidia driver for GeForce GTX 660

I am having troubles installing the Nvidia driver on my new installation of Ubuntu Gnome Remix (12.10, at first). I would be very grateful if I could receive some help from a kind soul out there.

I have tried the following so far:

  1. Setting nvidia-current and nvidia-current-updates from the GUI
  2. Setting nvidia-current after downloading sources:

    sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*
    sudo apt-get install linux-source 
    sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic 
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates 
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
    
  3. Trying the same with this line instead:

    sudo apt-add-repository ppa:noobslab/nvidia-quantal
    

After the three tries I updated to 13.04 and tried all the same again.

The result is for all cases:

The machine boots into what looks like an old version of Gnome, the screen resolution is very low. when I try to open the nvidia settings I get an error. typing this after installation:

sudo nvidia-xconfig 

does not help.

  • I have a ASUS GeForce GTX 660 2GB PhysX CUDA
  • The system works, but laggs, when I use the nouveau driver.

I will be forever gratefull if someone can help me out, I have tried for a good 7 hours to fix the problem now.


Solution 1:

I finally found a solution.

for anyone who faces a similar problem, this is what I did in the end (and what I think was what solved it :)):

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-source
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe nvidia_current
sudo gdm restart

now the system works like a charm.