Confusing Nvidia Driver Choices

[wrender]

I opend the the Additional Drivers and was greeted by a stack of options for the Nvidia drivers to install for my laptops 9800 GTS.

Anyone know which one is the correct driver to activate?

[doctordruidphd]

I can't say about the "additional drivers" installer, but if you want to do it from a terminal, the command would be:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings

This will install the driver and the nvidia-settings program for configuring it. You may also need to run

sudo nvidia-xconfig

to set up an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, if you don't already have one.

I gave up on the gui driver installer long ago, partly because it doesn't really tell you what it is doing.

Edit: You also have the option of installing the open-source nouveau driver, which would be satisfactory if you do not need 3d acceleration. Be aware that many screen effects may not work with nouveau, but to be honest, I haven't tried it recently, so it may have improved.

[wrender]

That worked! Thnx

[SteveRiley]

Edit: You also have the option of installing the open-source nouveau driver, which would be satisfactory if you do not need 3d acceleration. Be aware that many screen effects may not work with nouveau, but to be honest, I haven't tried it recently, so it may have improved.

I'm now using Nouveau on my T520. I need to drive two digital monitors on a docking station at work, and the Intel graphics chip isn't wired to the digital outputs. The nVidia binary blob still isn't working on some Optimus gear now (including my T520), so I've resorted to Nouveau. All effects appear to work when the compositing type is set to XRender. If I change it to OpenGL, unhappiness abounds.