If you experience problems or poor performance using Ubuntu's latest nVidia driver nvidia-glx-177 (as I did with a "nVidia Quadro NVS 160M"), try to upgrade to version 180. A package has been build for the next version of ubuntu (called "Jaunty Jackalope"), but sadly it has not been backported to Intrepid yet.

Who cares, I'll explain how to use Jaunty's repository with Intrepid to install this driver. First, make sure that you installation is up to date:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Now, add Jaunty's "universe" repository to Apt's sources:

echo 'deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty universe' | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jaunty-universe.list

Prohibit an unmeant package replacement using Apt pinning. Edit /etc/apt/preferences (which might not exist yet) and put the following lines into it:

Package: *
Pin: release a=jaunty
Pin-Priority: 40

Multiple entries have to be separated by blank lines. If you want to know what this entries mean: there is an excellent (german) article at FedoraWiki.

Now run apt-get update again. If you upgraded before, apt-get upgrade should report zero updates. If there is a bunch of updates now that has not occured before, cancel and check wether you've edited /etc/apt/preferences correctly.

Last step: install the driver.

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-180

If you did not used the proprietary driver before, you have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Or, what I would suggest, install and run envyng to replace your current driver.

Beware

Unfortunately, Suspend-To-Disk-Support seems to be completely broken in this version. X crashes on resume. I was not able to get this working, neither with 180.06 nor with 180.11. At the moment, I've installed nvidia-glx-173 again.