Installing an NVIDIA graphics driver on Ubuntu (9.04)

I decided to put this together because I've had to do this multiple times and simply searching via Google and forums has never given me straight up directions that worked. Read through all the steps before trying this.

One never knows if there will be strange differences based on having different hardware or settings. If you try this and get it to work another way, please post a comment describing what you did. For reference, the system I'm using is an AMD 64-bit machine with an NVIDIA GeForce G210.

This will probably work on any Ubuntu distro provided that it is current enough.

DISCLAIMER: If this happens to render your computer incapable of displaying anything useful on your monitor, I am not responsible. Be prepared with a backup of your X-server configuration file and a live CD to undo the changes that the installer file made. If replacing the X-server configuration file with your backup does not solve the problem, you'll have to look up another solution and complete the process on your own because I am too lazy to do it here.

That being said, installing the driver fixed the above problem for me when Ubuntu decided to be completely incompatible with my graphics card, which I had to remove before completing this process.

Step 1: Determine which NVIDIA device you have - skip this if you know

Again, if you know which graphics card you have, skip this step because it's unfortunately not as straightforward as it might seem. If you know how to do this (perhaps through your windows device manager on another partition) go for it. This will assume that your graphics card is plugged into a PCI slot and not on-board.

All commands will be preceded with a colon and should be typed without quotation marks.


Open a terminal and type: "lspci"
Below is a screenshot of what I got when I did this.
Look for "VGA compatible controller" or "Display controller." This should show you the device's ID number. Mine happens to be 0a60. To find out what this translates to , I did a Google search which came up with this helpful forum post (see pictures): http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/490809-nvidia-geforce-ion-quadro-198-05-whql-drivers-ms-update-released.html

This showed me that I have an NVIDIA GeForce 210.

Comments

[Lance Mt.]

Now thats useful. Thank you, Favourited and when the time comes of new tech in a linux beast, i'll know.