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escott28
March 5th, 2011, 11:42 PM
Hey all

I really hate having to ask stupid questions in these forums when the answer is obviously floating around the Internet somewhere, but it's come to the point where I really need the hand holding.

Ok, here's the issue.

I have a Sony Vaio F-Series laptop I'm trying to get a good working Ubuntu 10.10 64bit install on. I previously had a Fedora 14 installation running next to a windows install (Blasphemy in a Ubuntu forum, I know, but I've seen the light). I have previously installed Ubuntu on my desktop and struggled to get the ATI drivers working right but eventually prevailed (So I'm not an absolute n00b). The laptop is a different story. I have an NVIDIA card (400M series) but upon booting to the live disk and after installation, I have a screen resolution of 800x600 (Which you can Imagine looks absolutely awful on a screen that's supposed to be 1920x1080) with no way to change it. Ok, so I try to install the nvidia drivers. Nothing seems to work. I've tried to use the additional drivers option that Ubuntu kindly presents to me. However, this fails to work properly (as I should have learned from my issues with my ATI drivers). Now, after a re-install of ubuntu, I'm trying to get the nvidia drives from their website to work which involves killing the X-server and running at a different run level (Or so I understand), which, not only being a pain in the butt, is also a little above my n00bish head.

So, basically, where can I find DETAILED STEP-BY-STEP instructions on how to make ubuntu work in a reasonably sane manner (ie, run at 1920x1080, run compiz and do graphics work in blender and GIMP). These graphics drivers a such a pain and from what I've read, a given method seems to work for some and fails for others. I think it's just a mater of finding the proper procedure for my case.

I run a Sony Vaio F-series Notebook with
Core i7 cpu @ 1.73GHz
4Gb RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M 1GB

Thanks in advance for any help

Erik

wojox
March 5th, 2011, 11:57 PM
Read this it's the same Howto install nVIDIA drivers manually on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) (http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-install-nvidia-drivers-manually-on-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx.html)

escott28
March 6th, 2011, 01:31 AM
Read this it's the same Howto install nVIDIA drivers manually on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) (http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-install-nvidia-drivers-manually-on-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx.html)
Thanks for that. This is one of the thing's I've already tried. I think it's on the right track, but unfortunately I do not get the error message and thus cannot exit to terminal. I have tried what I understand is the equivalent to this and press Ctrl+Alt+F2 to boot into a lower run level. However, It says I need to disable X-server (this is when I continue in both the GUI run level and the lower one). Any ideas?

Thanks for the help. I think I'm kinda close now.

Erik

escott28
March 6th, 2011, 05:44 AM
Just wanted to bump this back up. I tried some af the alternate methods discribed there and nothing seems to work. Right now i have a computer showing me nothing but a lot of black ajd I'm getting really impatient and feustrated. I really dont feel I'm asking too much. Should this really be so hard?

Erik