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Ubuntu nvidia guide(explanation how to install)

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obviosly thats what i meant, lol.

but i was able to get the restricted drivers turned off and get the install of this "failed" driver reversed. im back at my normal resolution, and im going to attempt this again, but i have a feeling that ill have the same issue...

i think it has something to do with not having the source code

how is this possible?

Code: 
icrum@MythTVBackend:~$ sudo apt-get install linux-`uname -r` 
[sudo] password for icrum: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package linux-2.6.24-16-generic
 
You cannot build the kernel module you need unless you have the kernel source code available. I often forget this, since in Gentoo, there are no prebuilt kernels, so everyone has a kernel source tree. Howeve, in Ubuntu, you have to apt-get install some packages, and I get annoyed because I can never remember which. Note that it MUST match the kernel you are actually using. You cannot compile a module vs. one kernel source tree and then use it on another kernel.
 
i know, i just dont know how to get the actual code. using linux-generic gives me packages for some other kernel that i DONT have.

i was SO CLOSE a second ago. i installed the driver again. went through the routine of having bad resolution again. ran nvidia-xconfig from terminal, and did crtl+alt+backspace to restart X. then i got the nvida splashscreen, and logged in, but the resolution was still screwed up and my fonts were VERY small. nvidia xserver settings manager confirmed that i was using the new driver. i restarted the computer and it went to crap again. now im back to square one again. using the vesa driver and the new one is uninstalled again. i really dont know what im doing wrong or what im missing
 
did that about 3 times over already. never works. however i am letting the driver installer edit the config file i think, but i dont think thats the issue.

i wouldnt know what to put in the config file anyway.
 
ok i FINALLY got it installed.

what i did was:

used envy to install the 173.14.12 driver. then i installed my downloaded driver on top of that.

there has to be some package or something that envy downloaded or something that envy was doing that i wasnt. but the driver is installed.

however i am having one issue. everytime i restart the computer, it automatically goes to 800x600 res rather than my native 1600x1200 res. how can i make it stick to the right res on startup?
 
after a round of uninstalling everything and reinstalling everything (envy, then downloaded package from nvidia) its all working now. and automatically loads the correct res.

this is way harder than it needs to be. if its one thing i like windows better for its driver installation. i wish nvidia would make an installer similar to a windows installer for their driver installation. or at least a script or something that does everything and then all you need is to reboot. like what envy does.
 
what happened was you had conflicting drivers somewhere, something didnt get cleanly removed the first time, and the reason why envy worked is because it was able to remove the conflict.

I have had to fix this manually before and had the exact same problems as you describe here, and that was the culprit. At the time however I did not have access to the internet so this was quite a bit harder. I ended up hard coding the resolution in the xorg.conf file myself.

Never got 3d enabled this way but it was functional for what the computer does
 
In Gentoo, you just do "emerge nvidia-drivers" and then "eselect opengl set nvidia". No need to even reboot.
 
yea but doing that way you are limited to the drivers that in the repos. what happens when you want a driver thats beta? or supports cuda? or you just want the latest drivers? you have to manually install it.

sure i can just check "use restricted drivers" in ubuntu, but that only gets me 169.08 drivers. i can install envy, but that only gets me 173.14 drivers. i wanted the 177.73 beta driver, its the latest driver with cuda support, for GPU folding
 
gsrcrxsi said:
yea but doing that way you are limited to the drivers that in the repos. what happens when you want a driver thats beta? or supports cuda? or you just want the latest drivers? you have to manually install it.

sure i can just check "use restricted drivers" in ubuntu, but that only gets me 169.08 drivers. i can install envy, but that only gets me 173.14 drivers. i wanted the 177.73 beta driver, its the latest driver with cuda support, for GPU folding
Click to expand...

I believe Envy allows you to point the program at the newest drivers via the "manual" install, however I could be wrong
 
sure i can just check "use restricted drivers" in ubuntu, but that only gets me 169.08 drivers. i can install envy, but that only gets me 173.14 drivers. i wanted the 177.73 beta driver, its the latest driver with cuda support, for GPU folding
Click to expand...

Can't you just add a repository that includes those packages?
 
MRD said:
Can't you just add a repository that includes those packages?
Click to expand...

That is what I was thinking, and also in Gentoo usually the beta driver get make there way to portage they are just masked so that you have to tell it to use them, they are masked because they are beta and the standard user probably doesn't want to deal with beta drivers, that may or may not have problems.
 
That doesn't even make sense Fudge. There are things that are hard in Linux (or Windows, or OSX), but installation of nvidia drivers is extremely easy, and there's complete feature support.

Now if you want to talk wireless (not so bad now, it's gotten much better) or gaming (still a mess), then I can see having some issues with Linux. nVidia drivers couldn't be simpler though. I can do it faster than any windows user, and I don't have to reboot either.
 
It's only when you want fancy new BETA drivers things become a little more complicated, but, every OS has it's downfalls, even OSX, as much as you love it.
 
Stratus_ss said:
I believe Envy allows you to point the program at the newest drivers via the "manual" install, however I could be wrong
Click to expand...

manual just lets you choose between 3 different drivers. basically your choices are not so old, old, and very old.

MRD said:
Can't you just add a repository that includes those packages?
Click to expand...
i wouldnt really know how to do that since the package is just in the form of a .run file on nvidias website.
 
In Gentoo, eix gives this right now (on an AMD64 platform):

Code: 
[i] x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers
     Available versions:  71.86.06 96.43.07 100.14.09 ~100.14.11 100.14.19 [M]~100.14.23 ~169.07 ~169.09 169.09-r1 ~169.12 [M]~173.08 ~173.14.05 173.14.09 ~173.14.12 [M]~177.13 [M]~177.67 [M]~177.68 [M]~177.70 ~177.80 {acpi custom-cflags gtk kernel_linux multilib}
     Installed versions:  173.14.09(03:01:47 10/25/08)(gtk kernel_linux multilib -acpi -custom-cflags)
     Homepage:            http://www.nvidia.com/
     Description:         NVIDIA X11 driver and GLX libraries

The ones with a ~ in front are testing but probably stable, the ones with a [M]~ are hardmasked and quite possibly not stable. One command is all you need to install the drivers, and this includes the downloading, installation, and configuration.

Gentoo is generally better at providing bleeding edge software, although they were slow on firefox 3 because they were debating how to slot the xulrunner packages. (Even so, I just unmasked 3.0 and installd it and it ran fine.)

I can't imagine living in the world of proprietary software anymore where everything has some horribly restrictive license and there is activation on everything and extra charges for this and that. Argh. I don't know how anyone can stand that.
 
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