HowTo: NViDIA 185.18 Drivers in Ubuntu

[gewitty]

I'm still struggling with my 64bit Jaunty installation. Despite going through the How To very carefully several times, I still end up with the same problem: The drivers install OK and things like Compiz appear to be working. However, my screen resolution is fixed at 800x600.

This makes life very difficult, as I can't even get to the System/Preferences/Display settings as the menu bar is all screwed up at this resolution.

In the end, I just have to reset Xorg back to its defaults in order to get a proper screen resolution in VESA.

Can anyone give me a clue about what the problem may be, or what info I can post that might be of help.

[sherl0k]

I installed the beta driver from PPA and now I can't log in. Every time I just get booted right back out. I discovered that it was Compiz causing the problem so I uninstalled it and now I can log in, but I've lost my desktop effects. Any cause/fix for this?

[ibuclaw]

I'm still struggling with my 64bit Jaunty installation. Despite going through the How To very carefully several times, I still end up with the same problem: The drivers install OK and things like Compiz appear to be working. However, my screen resolution is fixed at 800x600.

This makes life very difficult, as I can't even get to the System/Preferences/Display settings as the menu bar is all screwed up at this resolution.

In the end, I just have to reset Xorg back to its defaults in order to get a proper screen resolution in VESA.

Can anyone give me a clue about what the problem may be, or what info I can post that might be of help.

Re-add the nvidia driver back into the xorg.conf file, and login with the Xserver resolution set at 800x600.

Then Press Alt+F2 and type in:

gksu nvidia-settings

Then go to the X Server Display Configuration and see if you can set the Resolution in there properly.
Apply, then Save to X Configuration to make the changes permanent.

Regards
Iain

[gewitty]

[QUOTE=tinivole;7274606]Re-add the nvidia driver back into the xorg.conf file, and login with the Xserver resolution set at 800x600.

Then Press Alt+F2 and type in:

gksu nvidia-settings

Then go to the X Server Display Configuration and see if you can set the Resolution in there properly.
Apply, then Save to X Configuration to make the changes permanent.

OK. I ran through the whole process from start to finish again. When I logged back in, I had a 640x480 screen res. I went into the Nvidia settings and looked at the X server display settings. In the screen resolution drop-down options, all I get is a choice of Auto, 640x480, or 320x240. When I disable the Nvidia driver, I drop back to VESA settings, which run at the correct 1440x900 (16:10) resolution.

[Trivi]

hey... hmm its very weird... i just cant make it work...

may i just do the process all over again? starting by 0?

or i will have a problem in the "new" installation if I ignore all the stuff i did before?

thanks

[Trivi]

Before I say anything... I know im bombarding you with this whole pieces of stupid stuff... and im srry but the 800x600 graphics really suck.

i started again... and now i think where the mistake is. I believe its in the "BYE BYE X" part. When I click alt + ctrl + f1 , nothing happens. It justs throws me to a dark screen with all the code stuff. Then if i place the code:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
it just tells me it cant stop it and stays in the black screen which to get out, i have to sudo reboot.

Im srry for all the **** above...

thanks a lot!

[ibuclaw]

Before I say anything... I know im bombarding you with this whole pieces of stupid stuff... and im srry but the 800x600 graphics really suck.

i started again... and now i think where the mistake is. I believe its in the "BYE BYE X" part. When I click alt + ctrl + f1 , nothing happens. It justs throws me to a dark screen with all the code stuff. Then if i place the code:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
it just tells me it cant stop it and stays in the black screen which to get out, i have to sudo reboot.

Im srry for all the **** above...

thanks a lot!

That 800x600 screen is most likely the result of you running an optional step. Removing the xorg-nv drivers is only required for some people who have driver conflicts, I am certain I have made that clear in the guide, but I'll review it later on, while in X, this will install the drivers to bring you back to a sane resolution, once you have pressed 'Ctrl+Alt+Backspace' afterwards.

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-all

When you say you are brought to a dark screen, have you tried any of the other tty terminals?
You can access them by going from F2 through to F6. (ie: Ctrl+Alt+F2).
Ctrl+Alt+F7 being the tty that hosts the Xscreen (GUI).


If you still can't turn off gdm, for whatever reason, you can switch to single-user mode:

sudo init 1

or reboot into "Recovery Mode", and select the Root Shell option.

Then start the driver installation from there.

sudo sh /usr/src/nvidia-driver

You will get a warning in doing so, but it is mostly harmless.

Regards
Iain

[Trivi]

And how can i get the recovery mode??j

its because i have the 8.04 kernel... then you told me to add some line in there and it was the 8.10 test kernel and i renamed it. I only have that part... i have no recovery of the 8.10... just for the 8.04...

thanks

[rcopper]

Cools.

If you have any tips on adding modelines in xorg, I'll be happy to include them in the guide, as if it happens to you, it may happen to someone else too.

Regards
Iain

Thanks for the tutorial again. as with regard to the modeline, I don't know if what I did was anything special, just added the following modeline (I had saved it in some file and knew that it worked in ubuntu 8.10):

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "CRT-0"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 81.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 75.0
    Option         "DPMS"
    Modeline "1280x1024@75" 156.43 1280 1312 1904 1936 1024 1043 1056 1076
EndSection

The only problem is that the drivers identify the LCD monitor as a CRT... that is odd... and the screen flickers sometimes too obvious.. especially when moving the mouse around.

[Mayfairy]

Thanks a lot for this awesome guide!

I had a lot of unknown artifacts on fresh Intrepid install with 177 drivers using 9800GT card. My old 6600 didn't have any.

180 drivers corrected those issues but it still didn't perform nearly as good as it should have.

Then I found this guide and followed it step by step, and all went without any problems and the end result was brilliant. Now I can actually play Runes Of Magic without neverending graphics lag every few seconds. The FPS still isn't nearly as good as supposed to, but at least I can play smoothly.