Nvidia 9500 GT and Ubuntu

As I do not really play computer games but still enjoy a little bit of hardware accelerated graphics (Compiz is really an eye candy and – believe it or not – enhances usability), I decided to get myself a GeForce 9500 GT from Nvidia, which is very cheap. Unfortunately, I had troubles with using device’s 3D-features from the very first. Neither using envy, the comfortable tool in order to install 3D video cards, nor installing the Nvidia binary drivers with Synaptic, nor compiling the drivers from scratch did work. Although I could use accelerated graphics after installing and restarting the Xserver, the settings seemed to get messed up after one or even after some reboots of my system. After restarting my computer, the screen would turn and remain black, when ever GDM was or should be started. The solution can be found by following the link below

The solution to this problem was to completely remove all nvidia packages, which accumulated during various installation odysseys. In order to do so, switch to a console (Alt+Ctrl+F2), log in and stop GDM by using the command
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
Then, search for all packages with the command
dpkg -l | nvidia
and feed all found packages into the uninstallation routine from apt-get with the command
apt-get remove [package name]
If you have removed all found packages, make sure that there are no references to Nvidia packages or modules in /etc/init.d by searching for leftover files with
ls -a | grep nvi
Remove found files, renaming does not help! Then, install the original driver for your Nvidia card obtained by the Nvidia servers and follow the instructions. Finally, a reboot should bring you into your preferred Desktopenvironment again, now with nice graphics.