So, after much struggling and a few reinstallations, I got my nVidia Geforce 8400 GS mining by installing the correct drivers, nvidia-cuda-toolkit, openssl, automake/autoconf, and cudaminer. The trouble is, while mining I can do hardly anything else efficiently. The next thing I'm going to try is doing it it another terminal screen using ctrl+alt+F2.
So I had the idea that I could use the onboard video for actual video and then just mine with the card. It really wouldn't change my life too much to do so. So I enabled the IGN on BIOS and then restarted, and tried to run Cudaminer again. No good result there. So I reenabled the nVidia card and what happened? Still no Cudaminer working. And now I'm reinstalling Xubuntu 14.04 again to recreate the situation where I had it mining (47KHs was nice compared to the 1.87 I was getting with just the CPU before -- I know, I know, I'm buying some mining equipment soon.)
So what I want to know is if there is a way to do what I had in mind, that is utilize the onboard video for video output but still mine with the the Geforce?
Let me know if any part of this didn't make sense.
Paul