Comment 242 for bug 1268257

The suggested solution ( sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-331 and sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-331-uvm ) stopped the Unity launcher and top status bar from displaying, and hotkeys (such as CTRL-ALT-T ) wouldn't work.

I switched to tty1 ( CTRL-ALT-F1 ), logged in, and after lots of online reading discovered the following:

* My linux version (found by using uname -or ) was 3.13.something. Apparently Ubuntu 14.10 (which is what I'm running) doesn't support that version (it's supposed to be 3.16.something). I've run the GUI-prompted updates every time they've appeared (every few days). I wonder how many other people out there are experiencing problems because of the same thing?

* I upgraded my linux version ( sudo apt-get update then sudo apt-et install linux-generic ).

* Then followed the instructions in this bug description ( sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-331 and sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-331-uvm ) and also reinstalled the packages ( sudo install nvidia-331 --reinstall and sudo nvidia-331-uvm --reinstall ). I'm not sure if this second step was necessary. Everything seemed to be compiling ok now.

* Finally, I deleted the dpkg config file which seemed to think it was ok not to display the Unity launcher or status bar (or window dressing for that manner: ( sudo mv ~/.config/dconf/user ~/.config/dconf/user-old ) and then rebooted the system ( sudo reboot ).

My (trying to be helpful) suggestions for the admins for this bug:
 1) Please include some of the above details as a "how to fix" if things go wrong. It's taken me a whole day to return my system to a usable state.
 2) Consider perhaps at some stage Ubuntu updates haven't upgraded from linux version 3.13.something and this is interfering with the nvidia packages (?)