Ubuntu :: Upgrading The NVidia Driver At The Text Console?

using Ubuntu 10.10 amd64, my older NVidia card suffered a hardware failure last week, and so I replaced it with an NVidia GTS 450.

As the driver that was previously in use was nvidia-173, at the next boot with the new card the X server didn't start. I got to the text console, where the /var/log/Xorg.0.log had the message that the GPU/chipset is unknown to the driver. (well, ok )

Some web searches revealed that the chipset GF106 of the GTS 450 is only supported by the NVidia 260.19.12 driver, which is not in the Ubuntu stock repositories, so I followed the instructions at http://halvar.at/blog/?p=258 to install the latest driver from the PPA repository:

sudo aptitude install nvidia-current
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude full-upgrade

In short, although all of the above worked fine, the problem is that even after a reboot, the system still uses the nvidia-173 driver (according to Xorg.0.log, and starting X still fails).

Before I tried the above, I also tried

sudo aptitude install nvidia-current

alone, in order to get the latest driver that is in the stock repositories, but the result is the same in both cases.

What do I have to do in order to activate the nvidia-current driver (either stock or from the ppa above) instead of nvidia-173??

I tried to modify the proper blacklist file in /etc/modprobe.d/... (sorry if the file names are slightly wrong - I'm typing all this from the top of my head, as the affected Ubuntu system has no graphics, and thus no graphical browser etc. ), but then there is the error:

"Error: API mismatch: the NVidia kernel module has version 260.19.12, but this NVidia driver component has version 173.14.28 ..."