Comment 78 for bug 948053

Revision history for this message
Michael Stephenson (mickstephenson) wrote : Re: nvidia-96 and nvidia-173 uninstallable on Precise

Personally I have solved this issue by getting a newever nvidia card however I wanted to try and help you guys out, dkms automatically builds and rebuilds kernel modules when it detects a change in kernel, which means when you install a new kernel from the repo, when you boot up it will take a couple of minutes or so longer because it is automatically compiling the new nvidia driver.
So I had a poke about with making dkms work for the new 173 driver and here is what I did maybe someone can get this working and post it as a guide for others to use:

cd ~/Downloads

wget ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/173.14.35/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.35-pkg1.run

chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.35-pkg1.run

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.35-pkg1.run -x

cd ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.35-pkg1/usr/src/nv

gedit ./dkms.conf

Paste in this crap:

PACKAGE_NAME="nvidia-173"
PACKAGE_VERSION="173.14.35"
CLEAN="make clean"
BUILT_MODULE_NAME[0]="nvidia"
DEST_MODULE_NAME[0]="nvidia_173"
MAKE[0]="make module KERNDIR=/lib/modules/$kernelver IGNORE_XEN_PRESENCE=1 IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=1 SYSSRC=$kernel_source_dir LD=/usr/bin/ld.bfd"
DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[0]="/kernel/drivers/char/drm"
AUTOINSTALL="yes"

Save and exit

sudo dkms add ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.35-pkg1/usr/src/nv

Check to see /usr/src/nvidia-173-173.14.35 exists

sudo dkms build nvidia-173/173.14.35

This is where it fails if this had work the next step would probably be:

sudo dkms install nvidia-173/173.14.35

Since I don't have an older card any more I don't have the necessary drive to follow through on this but I'm sure some of you guys still hit by the bug do, so go make it work and post the solution!