John Mercier

I recently wiped my dell xps m1210 and reinstalled ubuntu. It has been over a year since I have had to worry about the nvidia support on linux I wanted to make a post about it so I can remember everything I have to do to get this thing working right.

For those of you new to this, linux does not like proprietary software. I'm not sure how this makes linux better than windows but it really makes it hard for new users to get the best out of their system. Some of the major issues that come with linux are easily fixed in windows. Those issues are dvd support, multimedia files (such as mp3, mp4, and avi), sound drivers, video drivers. Today I'm going to work on video drivers.

Ubuntu makes installing video drivers pretty easy. All I had to do to install it was click system->administration->Hardware Drivers. The program will look for a nvidia driver to activate and make it work. Now, this is much better than when I first started using linux. I used to have to download the source for the drivers, compile them, and install them.

There are many problems I have with the nvidia driver. For one thing I use a laptop. I need to be able to quickly hook up a second monitor and use it with my laptop closed. On ubuntu this is not a fast process at all. I need to switch to that monitor using Fn+F8 twice. Then, when I close the laptop it goes into sleep mode. So, I have to make sure that is turned off in power management. Now that I am on my other monitor I have to adjust the screen resolution. My laptop has a 1280X800 resolution and my monitor is a 1920X1200. I'm not going into any more details on how difficult it is to get everything properly setup. It takes way to long and it is one of those things that keeps users away from linux.