Ubuntu Gutsy/Nvidia GeForce Go 6100/GLX.

Ages ago I noticed that the shiny desktop effects on my Ubuntu Gutsy laptop had stopped working.

I have only just got around in investigating, I eventually sorted it out but only after a couple of hours of fiddling. The symptoms were that although my /etc/X11/xorg.conf reported that my device driver was “nvidia” I could not enable the desktop effects and glxinfo reported Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".

locate reported that there were lots of nvidia remnants on my machine (which was once upgraded from Feisty) so I reckon in the past I had had to play around installing the Nvidia binaries rather than using the repositories.

Cutting to the chase, after a few failed tweaks, I did this:

1. To get rid of the old nvidia binaries: sudo /usr/bin/nvidia-installer --uninstall This reported a few issues with symlinks but I ignored them and carried on, after which it successfully restarted X.
2. I ensured that “restricted drivers” had Nvidia disabled.
3. In synaptic package manager even though the nvidia-glx packages were not installed I did a “completely remove” on them, and did a “reinstallation” of the 2.6.22-14 linux-restricted packages and rebooted.
4. Finally I re-enabled nvidia in the restricted drivers menu and this time it worked fine. Hurrah!

Another reminder to use your package manager whenever possible!