Ubuntu and nvidia-settings: How to Make Those Settings Reapply Themselves Next Time

You’re running Ubuntu (or Kubuntu, or Xubuntu, or Edubuntu, or…) and you have an NVIDIA video card. You have the binary NVIDIA drivers loaded and you’re using the nvidia-settings applet to configure your video settings. Everything works great. Then you log out or reboot.

When you come back in those settings are all gone until you reload the nvidia-settings applet. Is there a way to make those settings default for the system, or at least load when you log in? Yes, there is.

NVIDIA decided that making the changes system-wide wasn’t the right answer because in their estimation different people might have different preferences. This means that in order to get the binary NVIDIA driver to load the proprietary config file that nvidia-settings writes out (named ~/.nvidia-settings-rc) you need to use the following command once X is started:

nvidia-settings --load-config-only

Well, that’s not so bad. Now the trick is actually getting that to execute. Both Gnome and KDE will allow you to run applations when they start using their own internal facilities. You can also add the command to your ~/.xinitrc file. None of these cover when your computer goes in and out of a sleep state, however. In those instances you’ll either have to modify your ACPI scripts or you’ll have to run nvidia-settings manually.