Nvidia Kernel Upgrade Woes

I've spent the last several hours of rather frustrating personal computing time trying to get my Nvidia driver up and running again after doing an apt upgrade that included a new kernel. At first there was just not a version of 'nvidia-glx' linked into the newest kernel package (this was the method I originally used to install the driver), and so I went back to using the crappy 'vesa' driver for a week or so, hoping they would fix the linkage issue. That they did, but I soon discovered that this new version of the driver was incompatible with my graphics card, an apparently now outdated Nvidia 440 Go.

So began my epic journey to install the archived version of my beloved driver. I started out going to the nvidia site http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html and downloading the Linux AMD64 driver version 1.0-9631. After checking out the documentation, it all seemed pretty straight forward. That sounds pretty hilarious now. Like I said, the next few hours were spent trying to get it working. At one point I had it installing, but the module would not properly reload upon a reboot, so if I was all set if I wanted to reinstall the driver every time I booted. No thanks.

To make a long story short, I finally found a solution. It appears that the default modules and junk that were installed mostly with 'linux-restricted-modules' were preventing the new module from being properly linked. Here's the enlightening site that provided my blessed solution, http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/BerylOnEdgy

The steps I used are as follows:
1. 'sudo nano /etc/modules'. Add the 'nvidia' module to the list.
2. 'sudo nano /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common'. Make sure the file looks like: 'DISABLED_MODULES="nv"
3. Press 'ctrl-alt-F2' to open a new terminal, and enter the following:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential gcc gcc-3.4 xserver-xorg-dev
sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia-glx nvidia-settings nvidia-kernel-common
sudo rm /etc/init.d/nvidia-*
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9631-pkg2.run
sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
3. Reboot the computer and it should come up.

It has been stated that this process must be repeated each time the kernel is update, which isn't ideal, but now that I've figured out how to do it, shouldn't be as bad next time.

Oh, and as a side note, I'm back to seeing things in German (see my last post), so this post should be Uber impressive.