I started what an upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS to Ubuntu 14.10 on my old Mac Workstation today at 6:15 AM.  This was a project advertised as being three hours.

Ha!  It’s now 11:35 PM and I finally have everything working again!  To be fair, the actual upgrade only took 9 hours, it finished around 3PM, but then every once in a while WinAmp skipped on me so I wanted to install a low-latency kernel.

I installed a low latency kernel, and the X-server no longer recognized my monitor.  Further, lsmod showed the Nvidia driver was no longer loading.  I spent the next eight hours trying various incantations, manually editing configuration files, etc, at several points I had no X at all, just a text console.

Finally, I went and grabbed the driver straight from the Nvidia site instead of the repository, and it worked!  For some reason the driver supplied by the repository, even though it claims to be exactly the same version, simply does not work with the low latency kernel.

So now I’ve got the latest and greatest, a nice responsive workstation and WinAmp plays smoothly now.