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View Full Version : [ubuntu] video card drivers



bustherh
February 21st, 2009, 03:44 AM
I have recently installed ubuntu 8.10 on three computers. It was a struggle on all three to get the video drivers correct so that I could use compiz.

The first one had an nvidia card and I figured out that installing the driver available from the nvidia site worked the best. That computer kind of blew up shortly after I finished setting it up so that I could work on it. :(

Then I set up a second PC, this one has an ATI card. After trying out several it turned out that the open source drivers worked the best, although it is very buggy. I run dual monitors on this machine and it often will only show one monitor or mirror the screens or something else. I have to go to the display settings and switch back and forth from 1024 to 1152 several times before it will just suddenly display correctly.

The third PC was my PC at work which has a Nvidia e-gforce 6200 video card and I have not yet figured out the drivers. It seems that no matter which driver I try when I restart the x-server I get the starting in low graphics mode warning. I have tried every driver that I could find and I just cannot get it to work. I was trying to kind of impress my co-workers and prove to them that I could be just as productive with linux. Now they think I am a fool for switching from windows.

The thing that really bugs me is when I popped in the live cd to test ubuntu on that machine all of the advanced desktop effects worked fine, but when I installed ubuntu I just couldn't get it to work.

Does anyone out there have any suggestions on this subject?