Installing graphics driver in Ubuntu. Ask Question. Up vote 0 down vote favorite. Before there was nothing listed, but after doing a massive update to Ubuntu, everything worked out and the driver was installed successfully. – Wesley Feb 6 '10 at 22:11.
The hunt for gaming performance on is a constant and ever-changing challenge. The market for discrete graphics cards has become dominated by the two graphics giants: Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
This has meant the decision boils down to one simple question: Which company's graphics card do I buy? But once you delve deeper into the details this question becomes quite a complex one. The answer will change depending on your price/performance preferance; your operating system; other components in your computer; and at times even where you live.
If you visit online forums for answers there's also a constant back and forth between fans of both AMD and Nvidia over which graphics card has the best price/performance ratio, has a longer useful life and which performs best in which popular game. As Linux becomes more user-friendly and game developers add Linux support, the biggest question – outside of what physical card to buy – seems to be graphics driver performance. With varying levels of support for each platform, the performance of a graphics card will vary from OS to OS. Nvidia's installation process may take some time at first. Be patient and let the install give you the message that it is completed before rebooting. Going more in depth, let's start with.
Its Linux driver support is widely considered the best with consistent updates at almost the same frequency as Windows driver updates. However, the caveat here is that its driver software isn't opensource, which leaves many Linux users frustrated or forced to compromise. AMD's driver support lags behind Nvidia in terms of gaming performance, but AMD's graphics driver support is friendlier to open-source, as it offers both a higher-performing, closed-source Catalyst driver and an opensource Radeon driver. Intel, which offers integrated graphics processors on its newer processors, provides completely open-source drivers, although its integrated graphics chips are not powerful enough to compete with the dedicated graphics cards of AMD and Nvidia. Although Nvidia only releases a proprietary GeForce driver, the Linux community has created its own open-source driver called. Unlike the AMD open-source driver which was helped along by AMD's release of specifications, the nouveau driver has been built almost entirely through reverse engineering.
To Nvidia's credit, it has recently begun helping nouveau development by releasing documentation and specifications. So to recap, Nvidia cards have both proprietary GeForce drivers and open-source nouveau drivers.
AMD has proprietary Catalyst drivers and opensource Radeon drivers. Intel provides an open-source driver that's included in all installations. Now that you have a brief overview of the drivers available, let's get to work installing the right one for you. First, we'll cover the installation of Nvidia's GeForce and nouveau drivers.
We will be using the Ubuntu distribution (distro) for this tutorial, but these steps can be applied to any Linux platform with only minor modifications. In Ubuntu, the nouveau driver is the default for any new user.
In theory, it's a great feature because it's open-source. In practice, it's usable only for 2D graphics and may not work well, or at all, with newer Nvidia graphics cards and technologies. For 3D applications, such as games and modelling, it's usually recommended to stick to the Nvidia proprietary driver for the sake of performance and stability as well as support for Nvidia's latest graphics technologies, such as Nvidia HairWorks. How to install Nvidia drivers in Linux The nice thing about Nvidia's proprietary driver is that they are quite easy to install.
First, make sure that your system is updated and Linux headers are installed. To make sure they are, just use the following command in the terminal: $ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic Installing the Nvidia drivers can be done in three easy steps.
First, install the drivers themselves with $ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current in a terminal. The next step is more of a safety measure as there are cases when the Nvidia installation script doesn't run this command. This can lead to severe problems when the system reboots, so the solution here is just to run the command again separately: $ sudo nvidia-xconfig. Finally, reboot your system using the reboot command to apply your changes.
You should now be using Nvidia GeForce driver. The driver can be updated as you see fit by either running the command again or going to the Nvidia website and downloading and installing the new one. We recommend sticking to running the command as there's less risk of a new driver causing unwanted problems on your system.
However, it's important to note that you must remove the previous driver before installing the new one. The commands to do that are: $ sudo apt-get remove nvidia. && sudo apt-get autoremove Next, reboot and when you're back at the login screen press CTRL + Alt + F1 to switch to command console.
Login here with your username and password. When you're at the text console, you'll have to kill the current graphics session by running $ sudo stop lightdm. Finally, give permissions to the downloaded driver package and run it with: cd /Downloads && chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-.-346.35.run && sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-.-361.42.run From here, just follow the onscreen instructions and then reboot your computer. At next boot, run $ sudo nvidiaxconfig to save your new configuration. Optionally, you can also blacklist the nouveau driver to prevent it from installing itself during a system update or uninstall them completely.
If you want to do this, edit the following config file with: $ gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf Once in the file, add the following lines at the end and save the file. Blacklist nouveau blacklist lbm-nouveauoptions nouveau modeset=0 alias nouveau off alias lbm-nouveau off You can also choose to disable the kernel nouveau by running the following commands one by one: $ echo options nouveau modeset=0 sudo tee -a /etc/ modprobe.d/nouveau-kms.conf $ sudo update-initramfs –u And once you reboot you're done! Occasionally, a login loop error will occur after installing drivers. If this happens press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to the console and remove the drivers Graphics Drivers PPA Another method that was recently developed is the introduction of the Graphics Drivers PPA, which can distribute the latest GeForce drivers to desktop users if you opt-in for it. This method isn't completely devoid of errors, but can be much easier for the novice user to maintain and keep up to date with the best-performing drivers.
To add the PPA and update drivers run the following commands in the terminal: $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa $ sudo apt-get update If you ever run into an error due to a driver update, run the ppa-purge command to roll back the driver. The open-source nouveau driver can also be uninstalled after installing the GeForce drivers. However, this isn't necessary and therefore not recommended for most users. If you still want to remove nouveau, enter the following command in the terminal: $ sudo apt-get –purge remove xserver-xorg-video-nouveau.
How Hardware Drivers Work on Windows When you install Windows, you’ll need to install hardware drivers provided by the hardware’s manufacturer — motherboard chipset drivers, graphics card drivers, Wi-Fi drivers, and more. RELATED: Windows does try to help. Microsoft bundles a lot of these manufacturer-provided drivers with Windows,. When you plug in a new device to your Windows computer and you see the “Installing Driver” bubble pop up, Windows might be downloading a manufacturer-provided driver from Microsoft and installing it on your PC. Microsoft doesn’t write these drivers on its own — it gets them from the manufacturers and provides them to you after vetting them. If hardware isn’t working on Windows, there’s usually a driver to make it work. Unless you have an ancient device that only works with older versions of Windows, the manufacturer has done the work of making it work with Windows.
Hardware that doesn’t work is usually just a quick driver download away from working. How Hardware Drivers Work on Linux Things are different on Linux. Most of the drivers for hardware on your computer are open-source and integrated into Linux itself.
These hardware drivers are generally part of the Linux kernel, although bits of graphics drivers are part of Xorg (the graphics system), and printer drivers are included with CUPS (the print system). That means most of the available hardware drivers are already on your computer, included along with the kernel, graphics server, and print server. These drivers are sometimes developed by hobbyists. But they’re sometimes developed by the hardware manufacturer themselves, who contributes their code directly to the Linux kernel and other projects. In other words, most hardware drivers are included out-of-the-box.
You don’t have to hunt down manufacturer-provided drivers for every bit of hardware on your Linux system and install them. Your Linux system should automatically detect your hardware and use the appropriate hardware drivers. How to Install Proprietary Drivers Some manufacturers to provide their own, closed-source, proprietary drivers.
These are hardware drivers that the manufacturers write and maintain on their own, and their closed-source nature means most Linux distributions won’t bundle and automatically enable them for you. Most commonly, these include the proprietary graphics drivers for both NVIDIA and AMD graphics hardware, which provide more graphics performance for gaming on Linux. There are open-source drivers that can get your graphics working, but they don’t offer the same level of 3D gaming performance. Some Wi-Fi drivers are also still proprietary, so your wireless hardware may not work until you install them. How you install proprietary drivers depends on your Linux distribution. On Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distributions, there’s an “Additional Drivers” tool. Open the dash, search for “Additional Drivers,” and launch it.
It will detect which proprietary drivers you can install for your hardware and allow you to install them. Linux Mint has a “Driver Manager” tool that works similarly. Fedora is and doesn’t make them so easy to install. Every Linux distribution handles it in a different way. How to Install Printer Drivers You may need to install drivers for printers, however.
When you use a printer-configuration tool to configure CUPS (the Common Unix Printing System), you’ll be able to choose an appropriate driver for your printer from the database. Generally, this involves finding your printer’s manufacturer in the list and choosing the model name of the printer. You can also choose to provide a PostScript Printer Description, or PPD, file. These files are often part of the Windows driver for PostScript printers, and you may be able to hunt down a PPD file that makes your printer work better. You can provide a PPD file when setting up the printer in your Linux desktop’s printer configuration tool. Printers can be a headache on Linux, and many may not work properly — or at all — no matter what you do.
It’s a good idea to choose printers you know will work with Linux the next time you go printer-shopping. How to Make Other Hardware Work RELATED: Occasionally, you may need to install proprietary drivers your Linux distribution hasn’t provided for you.
For example, NVIDIA and AMD both offer driver-installer packages you can use. However, you should strive to use proprietary drivers packaged for your Linux distribution — they’ll work best. In general, if something doesn’t work on Linux out-of-the-box — and if it doesn’t work after installing the proprietary drivers your provides — it probably won’t work at all. If you’re using an older Linux distribution, upgrading to a newer one will get you the latest hardware support and improve things. But, if something isn’t working, it’s likely that you can’t make it work simply by installing a hardware driver.
Searching for a guide to making a specific piece of hardware work on your specific Linux distribution might help. Such a guide might walk you through finding a manufacturer-provided driver and installing it, which will often require terminal commands. Older proprietary drivers may not work on modern Linux distributions that use modern software, so there’s no guarantee an old, manufacturer-provided driver will work properly. Linux works best when manufacturers contribute their drivers to the kernel as open-source software. In general, you shouldn’t mess with hardware drivers too much. That’s the vision of Linux — the drivers are open-source and integrated into the kernel and other pieces of software. You don’t have to install them or tweak them — the system automatically detects your hardware and uses the appropriate drivers.
If you’ve installed Linux, your hardware should just work — either immediately, or at least after you install some easy-to-install proprietary drivers provided by a tool like the Additional Drivers utility in Ubuntu. If you have to hunt down manufacturer-provided proprietary drivers and extended guides for installing them, that’s a bad sign. The drivers may not actually work properly with the latest software in your Linux distribution. Image Credit.