Disabling the NVIDIA Nouveau driver in Ubuntu 10.04

sometimes you might want to use the most current nvidia binary driver rather than the nouveau driver package.. or you want no driver at all for whatever reason, so you need to disable the pre-installed nouveau driver..

note all commands below should be executed with root privileges, either prepend sudo or become root first by running 'sudo su -''

edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf

make sure these two lines are in there:

blacklist nouveau
blacklist nvidiafb

now uninstall the driver

sudo apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-nouveau 

also recreate the initrd image as newer ubuntu releases load the nouveau module in there already.

update-initramfs -u

and reboot