Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Installing the latest nVidia driver on Ubuntu 10.04

I updated my kernel and I had to update my nVidia driver again. (One of these days, I will come up with a bash script to automate this)

If you just want to install driver that works, just go to
System > Administration > Hardware Drivers
and follow the instruction.

If you want to install the latest one. Here is the step
1. Download the driver from nVidia website (I am going to assume you are downloading to Download folder)
2. Open up virtual terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. If you just see a black screen. Go back to the desktop by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7 and follow this post.
3. stop your graphic user interface, gnome by
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
4. You might get a bunch of error messages. Type Ctrl+Alt+F7 to check if gnome has shutdown. Type Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch back to the virtual terminal.
3. cd ~/Download/ (this is where you downloaded the file from the website)
4. sudo sh NV
type Tab to complete and enter
5. You should be able to follow the instruction and finish the setup now.

6. But if you get this message: NVIDIA driver install - Error: Unable to find the kernel source tree. This command will fix the problem:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

You still might get an error message like:
ERROR: File '/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensoins/libglx.so' is not a symbolic link.
But you will be fine and the installation will complete.

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