I installed the CUDA SDK on Linux. The SDK also updates the NVIDIA video driver. After the installation had run a message printed saying that the installation had completed with errors. I checked the log file and saw the installation had failed on a driver installation. After rebooting the screen was black. The computer was still working and responding to network requests. It just couldn’t display anything. I was able to get the screen to work in safe mode but the video card otherwise was outputting all black pixels.

Thankfully since the computer still responded to network request I was able to SSH into it and use apt-get to get a new driver installed.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-418