How To: If Your Nvidia Driver Won't Install (8.10)

[teet]

Big thank you to this thread! =D>
Especially the first poster, 67GTA, and to ravalox for showing how to do it in grub2.

Just to detail out what I did, so that if someone else comes along with this problem they can fix it also:

I'm running 10.04, have a Sparkle 8400GS graphics card and a Hauppauge HVR-1600 tuner card.

What I did was:

sudo vim /etc/default/grub

(I use vim, you can use the editor of your choice. If you're totally new, pico might be a good choice.)
And commented out the line that says:

#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

And added the line right after that:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="vmalloc=512M"

Then save the file. Then back at the command line you have to run

sudo update-grub

Then reboot and things should work.

Yay! You can't believe how long it took to isolate this problem for me. 8)

One question, for those of you who are better at this than me:
Note that I put "vmalloc=512M" rather than the originally suggested "256M". I did this because my graphics card has 512MB of RAM built in to it. Is that the right way to think of it? It seems to be working, so I wanted to get people's thoughts on that.

I just picked up a Hauppauge HVR 1600 off of ebay and found that it would not allow my nvidia drivers to load properly. I am running Ubuntu 11.04 (natty narwhal) and an Nvidia 9500 GT graphics card utilizing the "nvidia-current" drivers from the ubuntu repositories. I did the following to fix the problem.=:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

I found the follwing line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

and changed it to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash vmalloc=256M"

Then 'Control + x'. Then 'y'. Then enter to save the file.

Then enter:

sudo update-grub

Then reboot and everything worked for me.

-teet