Any help will be greatly appreciated

[Max Girth]

Re: Any help will be greatly appreciated

Thanks for all your help with this. Hopefully, I'll be able to forget all I know about winblows.

I got "unable to lock the administration directory..." when I tried sudo aptitude install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-source nvidia-settings"

[dibl]

Re: Any help will be greatly appreciated

Before you go that route, did you already try the Kmenu>System>Hardware Drivers? Be very patient after you click "Activate" -- it has to download and install a driver package in the background, and it won't give you any feedback until it is finished.

If it truly doesn't do anything after you click "Activate" (which is the case for me and my GTX260), then I recommend you open the Konsole,

sudo apt-get install envyng-qt

and then (continuing in the Konsole)

sudo envyng -t

and follow the menu to install the driver.

[flarson]

Re: Any help will be greatly appreciated

The message you got happens if you are not root,(not the problem in this case) or if two processes are trying to install software at the same time. If you have adept updating or trying to install and you run from the command line you will see this.

[Max Girth]

Re: Any help will be greatly appreciated

When I go to drivers, it appears as though the nvidia is loaded properly.
Note the word appears...
Still can't enable "desktop effects" though. Black screen with a square box for several seconds, then back to the desktop with the box unchecked.

[flarson]

Re: Any help will be greatly appreciated

After you get the drivers installed you will need to restart the Xserver, at minimum. The installation process should load the kernel module, which you can see with
lsmod | grep nvidia
if it is not there then
sudo modprobe nvidia
You probably also have to edit the xorg.conf file and tell it to use nvidia.
if it is installed
sudo nvidia-xconfig will do that for you.
When that is done restart the xserver.