Intimidated newb

I have a geforce fx5500 video card.

I went to the driver page and found what I thought I needed, and downloaded. I don't know what rpm is... my old pc is 32bit, so I picked that one.

But, when i open the file, it doesn't do anything? It's text...


I appreciate you guys helping someone like me, but keep in mind, I'm really dumb about computers, so I might be making mistakes that you'd never think of-

At first, Ubuntu 12.04 is not outdated, it is a LTS version and supported until 2017.
Regarding the Nvidia driver, don't use what you have downloaded. Start the "Additional Drivers" program instead and use that to install the correct driver, this is the recommended way.

I couldn't find the "additional drivers" program...

I did find the app, but when I tried to download, it hangs/ doesn't work.


Is that advise for getting drivers in Lubuntu?

It should be present in any version of Ubuntu, including Lubuntu. You can try to start it with its original name from the commandline

jockey-gtk

I tried to start with the command line, but it said it wasn't installed. I folled the instructions to install, but again, it didn't work for some reason.

That is weird, AFAIK it should be part of a default installation. Anyways, you should be able to install it using

sudo apt-get jockey-gtk

Then try it again. If it does not work please provide more information: What is not working, do you get any error messages, ...?

If I recall correctly, "Additional Drivers" is located in Control Center-->Hardware. It doesn't appear on the main menu.