Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

Jennings is a new Lenovo K450E. It’s replacing Boon which is getting flakier every day.
Jennings came with Windows 8.1 and UEFI. I tried to install Ubuntu alongside Windows, but failed. It turns out I was doomed from the start because I got Jennings with an NVidia card (GeForce GTX 750) that was so new, the Linux Nouveau drivers don’t support it yet, nor has nvidia-current been updated with the new NVidia drivers. As a result, when booting with UEFI, it would lock up. The Boot Repair Disk I needed to fix the UEFI issues also locked up. Eventually, I gave up and installed Ubuntu by itself in non-UEFI mode. For some reason, with UEFI turned off, it would load and run fine, except for the video being stuck at a lower resolution than the monitor could handle.
To fix that, I needed the NVidia binary driver, available at http://www.nvidia.com. The instructions are simple, just download and run the installer as root. The only catch? You can’t have X running when you do so. And because of the confused nouveau driver, I didn’t have any console TTYs. To get around that, I ssh’d in from another box on my network. Setting the runlevel to 3 didn’t shut down X. I had to sudo service lightdm stop for that. Once X was out of the picture, the NVidia installer ran and only complained that a distribution pre-install script failed, but that didn’t affect anything. After letting the installer update my X configuration, I ran sudo service lightdm start and was back in business–no reboot required.

Update: The console TTY issue has been solved, so there’s no need to log in remotely to do this. The bad news is that these steps must be run after every kernel update:

sudo service lightdm stop
sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-340.24.run
Accept/Yes/Reinstall to everything
sudo service lightdm start