Had two friends recently ask me about how to install the nvidia bin driver under ubuntu. There is instructions on the nvidia site on how to install the driver, however there are some ubuntu/gnome specific things that are not included.
Start off by downloading the driver from Nvidia’s site, this should get placed on your desktop. Now you want to drop into terminal 1 by pressing Ctrl+alt+f1. Now some prep work, if you are on a fresh install of ubuntu you will want to grab the build essentials:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
Now that you have the required material you need to stop your gnome desktop:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
Next navigate to the driver and run it:
cd ~/Desktop
sudo sh <Name of Nvidia Driver>
It is a strait through install, make sure to answer yes when it asks to run nvidia-xconf so it can re-setup your xorg.config.
Now you can restart the machine or just start gnome desktop back up:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
You should be good to go.