installing proprietary driver for GeForce FX 5600 graphics card

[papabearak]

I am extremely impressed with Precise Pangolin. It is extremely stable and functional, especially for a beta. The only thing holding me back from using it as my every-day OS is my inability to install the proprietary driver for my nVidia card. No proprietary driver means no hardware accelleration, which means no Open GL, which means there is a big, ugly black box around my Cairo Dock which I can't get rid of. Has anyone had any luck getting the driver for this card installed in Precise, and if so, how? I have been very impressed with Oneiric, which installed the proprietary driver during the initial OS install process and has automatically reinstalled it with each kernel upgrade. If I can get Precise to do the same, I will be a happy camper. Hopefully someone here has the answer I seek. Thanks in advance. Ben

[papabearak]

I have seen jockey listed in at least one of the updates I received, but don't recall seeing it listed in the menus by that name. I am going to boot into Precise right now, so that I can respond more accurately to future inquiries. Ben

[claydoh]

It is called "Additional Drivers" in the System menu.

One thing to note with the dev versions of any *buntu is that there is the extreme likelihood that proprietary drivers may be either broken or unavailable at any given time, and historically, the Nvidia graphics drivers often simply are not available from the manufacturer until much closer to release day.

[papabearak]

Okay, thanks claydoh. I was afraid of that. I have received several large updates in the past couple of days, and the most recent one included a number of graphics-related bits, as well as a new kernel. I was hoping that, upon reboot, I would receive an offer to install my proprietary driver, but alas, no joy! When I run "Additiona Drivers", it scans my system and reports that no proprietary drivers are being used on this system, but does not offer to remedy the situation. Hopefully the problem will resolve itself as the launch date nears. Thanks for your input. Ben

[papabearak]

Thanks for your suggestion Teunis. I checked out both site, but at present they appear to only have drivers for newer series nVidia cards than mine. With everything else working so well, I'll wait until they come to the trusted repositories, so I don't break my system, but again thank you for your input. Ben

[dequire]

I read somewhere that support for the older (5xxx) series nVidia cards was being dropped in 12.04. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I came across that somewhere.

[ardvark71]

I read somewhere that support for the older (5xxx) series nVidia cards was being dropped in 12.04. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I came across that somewhere.

Hi...

There is a hint of this here as well. If this is indeed the case, it will cause problems for more than a few people, I'm sure.

Hopefully, Teunis's suggestion works....

Regards...

[papabearak]

I read somewhere that support for the older (5xxx) series nVidia cards was being dropped in 12.04. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I came across that somewhere.

Ouch! I hope that is not true! I know these nVidia cards are getting a bit long in the tooth, but they work really well, and do everything I need them to do, and finding newer models which still plug-in to an AGP slot is difficult. Looks like I may be stuck running Oneiric for the foreseeable future. Not that that's all bad; Oneiric is far and away the best Kubuntu release I've ever tried, and sticking with it would not be a hard-ship, but I won't Be able to run RevLinuxOS 2.0 which is being based on Precise. A bit embarrassing, since I am on the development team. Ben

[papabearak]

Update: It's not as bad as I thought. After briefly searching online, I found that I can buy a geforce 8400 GS card for about $40 at several different merchants. The card has a PCI interface, not the now prevalent PCI-e plug which my mo-bo does not have, so it oughta work, without breaking the bank. Ben