Nvidia cards require the Nvidia driver (proprietary or otherwise) to install. It's relatively simple, but I don't know if any Live Cds have native nVidia support? (And I think ATI has issues as well) You can download the driver from the nVidia website and it is very easy to install. Now Ubuntu is based off of Debian so there may be a nvidia-kernel-image somewhere in the packages for Ubuntu (not sure), that would be the easy fix, but if you do that don't use the propietary driver.

I've got Dual Montior on nVidia geForce5500 so I know you can do it!

EDIT: There are tons of HOWTOs out ther for nVidia Drivers, Since you're using Ubuntu, I would search for nVidia Ubuntu, or nVidia Debian and see what comes up. As I use LFS now (despite my screenname) my setup was a little different, and from what I remember from Debian there is a distro specific way to setup nVidia.

The nv driver that comes with xorg works just fine; you may not
get quite the same performance in regards to OpenGL, but at
least you get a working system without downloading drivers ...


Cheers,
Tink

awesome, thanks you guys.

With all this info I''m sure to get it up and running.

If you haven't gotten it working yet:

I've had trouble with X sometimes as well. It usually helps if I choose "Start Ubuntu in safe graphics mode" instead of "Start or install Ubuntu" from the boot screen of the Destkop CD.

This will give you basically the same thing as "Start or install Ubuntu" (same GUI desktop, you can still click the Install icon, etc) but with vesa drivers that should work on pretty much _anything_. Then, at least you've got an install with a GUI you can work from and try to install the nVidia drivers from there. If you even need to - for surfing the web, watching videos, and so forth the vesa drivers worked fine for me.