Sitsofe,

In my personal experience just clicking on "Enable" in Restricted
Drivers Manager installs nvidia-glx from the repos and the user is
unable to stop this installation.  So if you have the NVidia binary
driver installed Xorg fails on restart giving an API mismatch.  This
would suggest that RDM is not leaving things alone if the NVidia binary
driver is installed.  I personally haven't updated my drivers for some
time but I faced this very issue in Feisty and Gutsy on 2 different
machines as well as having helped solve this issue for other users on
IRC who have reported the same behaviour.  I don't have a spare machine
to try it on at the moment as my desktop is very busy so I can't install
new drivers with RDM from the repos and restart Xorg.  However if you
have a spare machine you should be able to verify the issue simply by
installing the NVidia binary driver and then going into RDM in gnome and
clicking on "Enable" for the NVidia driver.  If you experience the same
problem as myself and others it will automatically install the nvidia-
glx drivers over the top of the Nvidia binary drivers and give an API
mismatch on restarting Xorg (either /etc/init.d/gdm restart or reboot).

It could be a recent update may have already fixed this as I have not
updated for sometime so I cannot confirm either way, I raised the bug
after another user experienced this issue today which lead to a
discussion on freenode between myself, the user and jdong.  Jdong
requested that I enter the bug just to make sure someone was aware of
it.

Iagree that users who stray from the repos are responsible for any
problems which may occur, however, if RDM is still installing repo
drivers over the top of the Nvidia binary driver with no exit route for
the user, then this is anissue which I feel needs to be resolved.  A
simple check for the nvidia-installer script in /usr/bin should in most
cases be enough for RDM to know the binary driver is installed.  If a
user has removed this install script after installer the Nvidia driver
then there is little to be done and they can't expect things to work
properly.  Since the same scriptis required for uninstalling the driver
it should not be deleted by the user in the first place.

Finally (and this is not a criticism of anyone, it just the reality of
the situation) even if a user has strayed from the repos, we still need
to actively support them where and whenever possible and indeed this
happens.  It would be unpractical to turn everyone away who asks for
help if they have made changes to their system via non "apt" routes, it
is very common for people to ask for help in these situations both on
the forums and on irc and I have yet to see anyone turn these users away
for breaking "best practise" protocols.  I need only mention the dreaded
word "Automatix" for anyone who has provided a support role in either
environments (forums or irc) to see this is true.  So it is fine to say
in theory that people moving outside of the repos are responsible for
thir own problems, but in reality it does become a support overhead as
being a community we naturally try to help each other whenever possible.
This is a good thing though, as it is a swing away from the RTFM culture
of the past decade and makes the community and distro much more
welcoming to new users, which is what we all want at the end of the day.

-- 
Restricted Drivers Manager and NVidia
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131852
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