How do I install these newer Nvidia drivers?
 

I am trying to install some new Nvidia drivers on my Ubuntu 10.04, because the driver I have now, may be causing some kind of problem. I am running Dungeons and Dragons Online in Wine, and it seems to run quite well on all max settings. But, when I exit the game, my screen turns completely red and I can barely read anything. Its this way for anything that I manage to open. The system must be restarted for me to be able to read anything, and for there to be any other color besides red.

So, I went into the game and asked in the general chat for a linux user. Found one, and he said that I might want to try updating my drivers. The "Nvidia X Server Settings" (under System>Administration) in ubuntu, says that the current driver is version 195.36.24. There is an outdated one visible in the "Hardware Drivers", version "173". The newer one (that it says is actually in use) is listed there too, but its version isn't mentioned.

Anyway, I went to the official Nvidia website, and it seems that my drivers are far out of date. The website has version "256.44" available for download. That seems like a giant gap between that, and my drivers.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-d...44-driver.html

If you look at the middle of that page, you can see "Additional Information" tab on the left. It has the exact installation instructions for the new drivers there. Here is the output of my terminal:

justin@justin-desktop:~$ sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44-pkg2.run
[sudo] password for justin:
sh: Can't open ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44-pkg2.run
justin@justin-desktop:~$ cd Downloads
justin@justin-desktop:~/Downloads$ sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44-pkg2.run
sh: Can't open ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44-pkg2.run
justin@justin-desktop:~/Downloads$


What did I do wrong? How do I install it? I thought I followed the instructions pretty closely..

BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia - Community Ubuntu Documentation : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bi...erHowto/Nvidia

Ok thank you. From what that guide says, from what I can tell I did everything right and I still got that terminal output in my first post. Since that link that I posted didn't work, here are the installation instructions from nvidia for the driver:

"Note that many Linux distributions provide their own packages of the NVIDIA Linux Graphics Driver in the distribution's native package management format. This may interact better with the rest of your distribution's framework, and you may want to use this rather than NVIDIA's official package.

Also note that SuSE users should read the SuSE NVIDIA Installer HOWTO before downloading the driver.

Installation instructions: Once you have downloaded the driver, change to the directory containing the driver package and install the driver by running, as root, sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44-pkg2.run

One of the last installation steps will offer to update your X configuration file. Either accept that offer, edit your X configuration file manually so that the NVIDIA X driver will be used, or run nvidia-xconfig."

Well I tried again, and I think that I actually did it right this time. Only one problem though. How do I remove X server? And what the heck is X server?

Starting to think this website doesn't have near as many members as it claims...

X server is your Graphical User Interface. What you need to do is change run levels. Depending on your version you would have to use upstart or init, to change to a run level which does not use X server.

I don't use Ubuntu so don't shoot me if I'm wrong.

You do not want to remove the X server! What the message is telling you is that you should exit the X server before running the nvidia driver installer. Usually this is done by logging out of your desktop session and going to init 3 or whatever init runlevel you need to go to to be in multi-user mode, but not running X.

X is the video server which provides the graphical desktop you see. All video, except for console video in virtual terminals, is provided by X.

I've not followed the link provided by craigevil, but: usually with Ubuntu you install the nVidia driver using your package manager. If you don't want to do that (maybe to get a version of the driver that is newer than what your package manager offers) then you have to run the nVidia installer from the virtual terminal, with X stopped. On Ubuntu, to stop X, I believe you go to a virtual terminal, then issue a command(s) something like:
Then run the installer.

The above command may need slight adjustment - I don't use Ubuntu so I don't remember this off-hand; but this command (and other discussion about installing the driver into Ubuntu) is floating around here in many places, so search around a little if the above doesn't work.

As for the number of members LQ has - we have a lot! But, at any given time, one cannot expect 100's or 1000's of members to be logged in at all times. It's summertime in much of the world, for one thing, so some people are on vacation. Some are at work. Half the world is asleep at any moment. And, some people only log in once in a blue moon, when they need help. :) Patience is a virtue; and, if still awaiting a reply to an issue, providing any further info that you can add to your thread as an update is a good way to get renewed attention.

Best of luck!

EDIT: P.S. - while the numbering system of the nvidia driver makes it look like there's a huge gap between driver versions, I assure you there is not. The driver version went from 195.xx.xx right up to 256.33 one day. There were no versions in between.

Hi,

I'm a bit of a Linux newbie myself, but according to my book, X is described as a graphic utility which provides underlying graphic operations. You don't want to get rid of this. It is used by GNOME and KDE. Basically, it is called an X server because applications act as clients which make requests to the X server when they need to perform display operations. So an application can send a request to do things like create a window without knowing the specific details of how to do this.

For an explanation of runlevels, go here: http://www.linux.com/news/enterprise...nd-rcd-scripts

To change the runlevel, you are supposed to use the telinit command: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl8_telinit.htm

Please correct me if I am giving incorrect information.

@GrapefruiTgirl

I believe:

...should be sufficient. ;)

Yeah, Ubuntu's NVIDIA drivers in the repositories are usually a little out-of-date in my experience. Here's what I did on my Ubuntu 9.04 system:

• Downloaded latest .run installer from NVIDIA website
• Opened an X terminal and entered sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
• Once in a text-mode VT, cd'd to the dir where the .run installer was
• sudo chmod +x NVIDIA_<whatever>.run
• sudo sh NVIDIA_<whatever>.run

First off, running Windows games using Wine is problematic at best. I doubt that using a newer nvidia driver would make a Windows game run better from Wine.
The 195 driver is the most recent nvidia driver available in the Ubuntu repos.
If you really want to install the driver from nvidia.com you will first have to remove the driver you installed from the Ubuntu repos. Having the nvidia driver from the Ubuntu repos and the driver from nvidia.com both installed on your system will cause problems.
See this for installing the driver from nvidia.com on Ubuntu 10.04:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-inst...ucid-lynx.html
In previous versions of Ubuntu you had to first install the build-essential package and the linux-headers for the kernel you were running before installing the nvidia driver from nvidia.com. Apparently this is no longer necessary.
Also, the command to stop X in Ubuntu 10.04 is:
Just run that from a virtual terminal (ctrl + alt + F2) to stop X
And to restart X:
The driver from nvidia.com may need to be reinstalled when there are kernel updates for Ubuntu.