I needed to install ssh-server on my machines. One is Ubuntu 9.04 and the other is Ubuntu 8.10.
This installation prompted me for several automatic updates, things like bind, (I didn’t keep track of them all). When these were installed, a restart was required.
After the restart, the nVidia driver will no longer load, on either machine. The displays appear to already have an X server running on :0 when I start the machine, so I have to run in degraded graphics on :1.
None of my CUDA code will run now either. (Which stands to reason if the driver won’t load).
I searched this forum for threads with similar problems, but didn’t find any.
In all likelihood, the kernel was updated. As a result, you no longer have the NVIDIA drivers installed. You will have to reinstall the drivers.
In that case this is not that big of a problem. So I will reinstall the drivers. I suppose if that doesn’t work, then we reinstall the toolkit, etc.
EDIT: Yes, reinstalling the driver has fixed things. It is annoying that there doesn’t seem to be one, consistent, effective way of stopping the X server in order for the nVidia driver to install. There are quite a few recommendations available on the web - when I initially installed the drivers, each of my machines responded to a different command. Now, neither one responded to any command to really stop the X server, so I ended up using an option in a popup given by the server when it realized it couldn’t use the driver, to fail the X server startup to a console, which did work. This isn’t really an nVidia issue, but it’s somebody’s issue. If installing the driver is going to be regarded as routine, and the driver installation needs to stop all X servers, then there has to be one sensible way to tear down all your X servers which actually works consistently.
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop will work on all the Ubuntu versions you mentioned.