The VGA out on my Dell D820 wasn’t working so I downloaded and ran the Nvidia installer for the latest native driver making sure I followed the pre-reqs documented here. That fixed VGA out and made the open gl screensavers work appropriately. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it took out my wireless. That’s because removing the linux-restricted-modules package, as the instructions suggest, uninstalls a wireless dependency. If I had known that (which is pretty clearly documented on the Ubuntu forums) I would have followed the alternative method which is to add “nv” and “nvidia_new” to the DISABLED_MODULES list in /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common and then run the Nvidia installer.

The message I was getting when I was trying to start up the wireless interface without the restricted modules package installed was:

SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
eth1: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
eth1: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
Bind socket to interface: No such device
Failed to bring up eth1.

After running the installer with the DISABLED_MODULES set both Nvidia and wireless are behaving.