Installing nVidia Drivers in Ubuntu 11.10 - Then Reverting...

Everything after the horizontal rule went okay until I realized my nVidia card was so freakin' old that I had to use the oldest batch of legacy drivers (and couldn't get them to work).

Anyway, went back to my Matrox card that I *knew* worked... But the Unity desktop wouldn't display! I simply got a desktop with a Nautilus menu bar at the top.

After trying every tip I could find, I boiled the fix down to this:

sudo apt-get purge compiz unity ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install compiz unity ubuntu-desktop

Finally, the good ol' Unity launcher is back!

---

Got everything I needed from this page:
http://www.moonlitdog.com/nvidia_ubuntu

But, I liked the "nomodeset" option from that page to boot into the GUI with basic video when necessary:

1. At the Grub screen, hit 'e' to edit one of the lines
2. Add 'nomodeset' to the end of the 'linux' line, ex:
   linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-15-generic root=UUID=... ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7 nomodeset

That's it!

Thanks for the quick, concise instructions, moonlitdog!