apt method to get the latest nvidia driver

Solution 1:

The best way of using the most up-to-date version is following this manual . It has every step well explained, and some really good advices before doing it.
I seriously recommend you not to do it, and stick to the drivers in the official repositories, but if you are really experiencing issues, and you think that updating your Nvidia drivers will solve them, this is the best way of doing so.

Good luck!

Solution 2:

An easier way than manually installing the drivers is to add the Ubuntu X-Swat PPA; you can find the instructions here: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/06/how-to-install-nvidia-25635-display.html

But please note that it will install the latest released driver, which may not be very stable. With that said, I have had the PPA enabled on may laptop since I installed Maverick, because the default (260) driver was very dodgy while the current (270.29) is somewhat less so...

Finally a tip: check out ppa-purge (more info here: How can PPAs be removed?) if you want to revert the driver...

Best of luck

/N