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Page Contents Author Introduction Licensing Issues Notes Prerequisites Installing the NVIDIA driver from within the GUI Installing the NVIDIA driver without the GUI Installing the latest NVIDIA driver Troubleshooting

Author

Bill Giannikos (bill2 at giannikos.com.au)
www.billgiannikos.com

Introduction

This guide will help you configure the proprietary NVIDIA driver under Ubuntu 7.10. I will not be covering the open source nv driver included with Xorg because its configuration is normally handled automatically by most Linux distributions.

Licensing Issues

NVIDIA provide their own license for their driver. You will need to read and accept this license before proceeding. You can read this license here.

Notes

While this guide is mainly focused to laptop users there isn't any difference for desktop users.

Prerequisites

You should run a full update for your installation of Ubuntu to ensure you have all the latest packages installed.

Installing the NVIDIA driver from within the GUI

Ubuntu 7.10 includes the NVIDIA driver which makes installation quite easy. Here is how:

1. Launch the "Restricted Devices Manager" program from the menu System -> Administration -> Restricted Devices Manager
2. Enable to NVIDIA driver
3. Reboot

Like many things in Ubuntu this is nice and easy.

Installing the NVIDIA driver without the GUI

If you are unable to launch the GUI and are forced to install the driver from the text console follow these instructions.

1. Type in the following:

2. Reboot

Again this is fairly easy. Please note that this will install version 100.14.19 of the NVIDIA driver. If you have a older graphic chip and this newer driver doesn't support it you can replace "nvidia-glx-new" in the above command with "nvidia-glx" or for even older chips with "nvidia-glx-legacy".

Installing the latest NVIDIA driver

If you need or would like to install the latest NVIDIA driver then you can use the excellent Envy installation program. This will fetch the latest NVIDIA driver and compile it for your system automatically.

Troubleshooting

Normally after installing the nvidia driver with the steps above your xorg.conf file should have automatically been updates to use the newer driver. If this did not happen or for some reason it has reverted then enter the following command:

This will switch you back to the nvidia driver.