Comment 6 for bug 418681

Here's what happened to me...

I upgraded my new macbook 13" ( model 5 ) running Karmic/64-bit earlier this afternoon. The update happened to include both a new kernel ( -7 ), and a new version of the nvidia driver ( 185 ).

After rebooting, the system would only come up with a command-line login prompt.

Bryce and I chatted, and after checking out my Xorg.0.log file, it indicated that the nvidia driver couldn't be loaded.

Mario chimed in and asked whether or not nvidia-glx-185 was installed. It wasn't, however I did see:

nvidia-185-kernel-source, -modaliases, and -libvdpau.

So, I ran:

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-185

...and it installed fine.

However I still wasn't able to get X to start. This time, when I examined Xorg.0.log, I discovered that it complained about an "Invalid ELF header". So next, I ran:

% file /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so

...which reported that the file was "data"! !@#%

I grabbed the .deb from the cache and extracted it's contents, and the _drv.so file was correct.

So, in order to resolve, I purged the old nvidia-glx-180 package, and re-installed nvidia-glx-185 and everything now seems back to normal.