Comment 10 for bug 660596

 I have Ubuntu 10.10 a new'ish Vaio laptop with an NVIDIA 310m and have had all the same problems - it worked in 10.04 and then didn't when I upgraded to 10.10 - Blank screen and then 'no screens available', etc. I've just fixed it with the following...I've tried to detail things as much as possible. But please bare in mind you will need your laptops custom EDID before starting.

Here we go:

A) Go to the Synaptics Package Manager, do a search for NVIDIA and remove everything.

B) Download NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.53.run from the NVIDIA Linux website and save it somewhere

C) Open up a terminal and type
Code:

/etc/init.d/gdm stop

D) now type
Code:

sudo bash

E) then navigate to the folder where you saved your NVIDIA driver

F) Type
Code:

 ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.53.run

G) Click yes to everything

H) restart and boot up in safe mode (hit shift after bios)

I)edit your Xorg .conf file by opening up a terminal and typing
Code:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

J) If you like remove everything in it and paste in the following (you may have to change the customedid path and also your busID) and save:
Code:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Device0"
    Driver "nvidia"
    VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
    Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0"
    Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:/etc/X11/nvidiaedid.bin"
    BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

K) open the terminal again and type:
Code:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub/

and change the line to the following: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

L) Now often when restarting every is faced with the no screens problem, I think this is due to nouveau being a pain, so open up your terminal again and type
Code:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

and in this file at the bottom add the following
Code:

blacklist nouveau

---works for me