My /etc/X11/xorg.conf had been modified by a previous download of the nvidia driver. I think it may have been a tar file from nvidia’s website. At any rate, the driver was no longer loading after I upgraded to Feisty (and maybe it had not been working before). xorg.conf provides a command to overwrite the file with the repository version, which worked perfectly for me. It also realized that I had nvidia-glx installed already, and put in the correct settings for it.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
While I was cleaning up, I removed the old open source nv driver, xserver-xorg-video-nv.
06/18/2007 Hmmm… Somehow my nvidia driver got screwed up and I had to use vesa (installed via the above example) to get GDM up. I tried reinstalling the nvidia-glx-new driver mulitple times, as well as the restricted modules to no avail. Finally in reading through this (dead link: http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Latest_nvidia_feisty) example, I found the command:
sudo apt-get install linux-generic
which seemed to upgrade my restricted-modules to match my current kernel. I’m not sure how they got out of date, but after running:
sudo nvidia-xconfig --no-composite
everything seems OK again.