Ubuntu - The Story of a Single Driver

Nothing foreshadowed trouble today’s beautiful day. Therefore, when Ubuntovsky Update Manager unexpectedly offered to update the packages, as always, I agreed with peace of mind. He didn’t even suspect anything when he offered to reboot after that (windows roots affect) ... But when at the start I saw this:

(EE) NVIDIA (0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module! Please ensure
(EE) NVIDIA (0): that there is a supported NVIDIA GPU in this system, and
(EE) NVIDIA (0): that the NVIDIA device files have been created properly.
(EE) NVIDIA (0): *** Aborting ***
(EE) Screen (s) found. but none have a usuable configuration.

- I really was stunned. Reinstalling drivers with recompilation for the kernel did not give anything. Well at least kind ubunt suggested that I boot using good old VESA to diagnose what happened.
And here I am, sitting in the resolution of 640 by 480, I climb the forums in search of an answer. Immediately I realized that a lot of people faced the problem, and, interestingly, it was solved differently for everyone. Xorg.conf was silent as a partisan, and pretended that everything was as it should be. Somewhere under the subcortex, I thought that the problem could be in the updated kernel headers ( linux-headers ), and then I found confirmation of this: it turns out that the ubunt loads these modules in the reverse order, that is, from the old to the new. Then I had to use heavy artillery ...

$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get remove linux-headers * nvidia * restricted * xserver-xorg g ++ gcc
$ sudo aptitude autoclean
$ sudo aptitude clean

And then on his now “pristine clean” system, he gradually brought everything back:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-'uname -r 'g ++ gcc xserver-xorg

And only after that

$ sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.22-pkg1.run

When installing, there were a lot of errors, but at the end everything seemed to be “successfully”.
Holding his breath, rebooted - hurray! Everything worked, effects, compiz, games!

If you encounter such a problem and nothing helps you - try such a "heavy-artillery way." And if you think that I have done everything in vain - comment :) We will discuss.