14.04 - NVidia GeForce 8300 GS driver trouble

[CelticWhisper]

I recently installed the nvidia-current package on my HTPC running an ASUS motherboard with onboard GeForce 8300GS chipset and noticed two things:
1. The installed version was Nvidia-304, fairly old compared to what was available through the "Additional Drivers" dialog (340).
2. Video playback in Kodi seemed to be stuttering. Granted, it was a fairly high-bitrate 1080p h.264 file but I had played back comparable streams without noticing any performance issues.

I installed the nvidia-340 driver via Additional Drivers, noting that it was marked "Tested", and restarted. Upon doing so, I was presented with a layer of flickering and distorted graphical elements from my Kodi GUI on top of the usual Kodi home window, an unresponsive keyboard and, most troublingly, an inability to SSH into the host. In hindsight I should have tested more before assuming it was best to update drivers but, in my defense, the driver did show up automatically for my 8300GS and was in the list as a tested entry.

Can someone recommend the best way to recover from this condition? My media is on an eSATA MD RAID10 so I don't lose anything other than time on reconfiguration if this box is so badly hosed I have to reinstall, but I also know better than to think there isn't a quicker fix than that.

Thank you!

[X-RED_Tech]

You can check what version Nvidia recommends for each card at geforce.com. Then all you have to do is open additional drivers and select that one if available.
340.96 is the recommended and you add it available all the time but you decided otherwise.

[oldfred]

If you installed a second nVidia driver, did you purge the first one?
Driver install does not delete older version and you often end up with conflicts.

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*

sudo ubuntu-drivers devices
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall


#see details for version installed
sudo apt-cache policy nvidia*
dkms status