Moving from 10.10 to 11.10 was a major step backwards in terms of my dual head setup.  Today I am going to try to rectify this problem.

First to identify my hardware and driver level.

lspci | grep VGA

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G96 [GeForce 9500 GT] (rev a1)

and now the driver level. 

I am going to use this site to help me through the issue http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/285.05.09/README/index.html

checking minimum software requirements

nallison@grote-ubuntu:~$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 3.0.0-12-generic (buildd@crested) (gcc version 4.6.1 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.1-9ubuntu3) ) #20-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 7 14:56:25 UTC 2011


nallison@grote-ubuntu:~$ Xorg -version


X.Org X Server 1.10.4
Release Date: 2011-08-19
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-29-server x86_64 Ubuntu
Current Operating System: Linux grote-ubuntu 3.0.0-12-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 7 14:56:25 UTC 2011 x86_64
Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-12-generic root=UUID=9482953d-cd0f-45d7-9aea-0b5c217a4898 ro
Build Date: 19 October 2011  05:21:26AM
xorg-server 2:1.10.4-1ubuntu4.2 (For technical support please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support) 
Current version of pixman: 0.22.2
Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
to make sure that you have the latest version.


Downloaded the latest nVidia driver for my card ~/Downloads/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-290.10.run

As a note here, to get into text mode on Oneric 11.10, I needed to get to the grub boot menu and append "text" to the end of the boot line.   No way to get to init 3 from the current version.  It seems to be a known bug.  

once I downloaded the latest driver for linux 64bit from the nvidia site (www.nvidia.com).  I was able to install from text mode by running


NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-290.10.run

and running nvidia-settings