Comment 52 for bug 173418

I would also like to add something else to my fix. After rebooting X will fail with the beta driver. I have no idea why but the only way I was able to fix this was to uninstall the nvidia-kernel-common package in addition to the nvidia-glx-new. So here is revision 2 of the work around.

1. Download the 173.08 nvidia beta driver here http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html click on archive and find the 173.08 driver.
2. Purge the nvidia restricted package and the nvidia-kernel-package if installed by doing a "dpkg --purge nvidia-glx-new nvidia-kernel-common"
3. Kill the gdm server, "/etc/init.d/gdm stop"
4. Install the driver downloaded in step 1, unless you are brave you need to let the nvidia installer modify the xorg.conf file.
5. start gdm server "/etc/init.d/gdm start"