Xubuntu 12.04 + Nvidia = problems

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#1

Hi all,
I’m having hard time setting up proprietary Nvidia drivers with a brand new Xubuntu installation.
I have an Asus N75 laptop with a GeForce GT 555M 2GB video card.
Beware, I’m a complete newbie of Linux.

  1. Xubuntu’s Additional drivers program tells there are no drivers available; why, if they are available from Nvidia.com website?

  2. I tried downloading the drivers from Nvidia.com, but the installation fails because X is running; how the hell am I supposed to launch the installation without a GUI?

  3. I tried adding x-swat PPAs and updating, but after the installation I get this warning: “You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run nvidia-xconfig as root), and restart the X server.”

As a side note, I downloaded Blender from

None of the three packages executes and I get no error message whatsoever.

These are the things that makes me wonder whether Linux will ever be user-friendly… :frowning:

#2

Yes. It is already.

However if you are a complete noob, I would suggest going with just regular Ubuntu and installing XFCE when you’ve got your system up and running. I believe most of the real newbie friendly stuff is in the regular version, and if you switch to xfce later it will basically end up the same any way.

Also, You’ll get much better advice from the Ubuntu forums with questions like this.

Regarding your side note, I’m running 12.04 and have no problems at all running builds from the sites you mentioned. Try running it from a terminal and tell us what it says.

#3

Nvidia’s drivers are proprietary and cannot be bundled with Ubuntu, though there are usually alternatives available if the hardware is properly detected.

To install the proprietary drivers you must shut down the UI first. Since the drivers are responsible for running the graphicall interface this surely makes sense. You first stop the gui, install the driver, then restart the gui. Windows does this too.

Did you run ‘nvidia-xconfig’ and restart the x-server? What was the result?

As freen said, you are better off at ubuntuforums.org for questions about drivers and hardware.

#4

Thanks guys, I’m not a fun of Terminal so I’ll follow your advice and try the ‘regular’ Ubuntu with Unity, let’s see what happens.

About Linux being user-friendly, mmmh, while I appreciate what Linux is and what achieved in these years (the reason I’m installing it is to gain some render speed) I have to disagree, but don’t want to start a war so let’s just say everyone is entitled to his own opinions, right?

#5

If you’re not comfortable using a terminal, you can open a terminal and drag and drop the blender executable and it’ll auto fill in the path. Then you can just hit enter to see what the error is.

Nvidia drivers you’re usually better off sticking to what the distro provides you since they’re stable. The most recent drivers I had to roll back on Arch because they have a bug that makes your entire interface crawl at 1fps. :confused:

It is pretty easy to setup and run these days. Most of your issues are due to you trying to do things how you would on Windows. Linux just works quite a bit differently than that, and old habits die hard.