How to install Nvidia/ATI graphic cards drivers in Ubuntu 9.04

Many a times users mess up their system while installing graphic card's driver. In this howto, I am going to tell you 3 different ways to install your Nvidia/ATI graphic card's driver in Ubuntu.

In order to know the type of graphic card you have run this command in terminal (Applications->Accessories->terminal).

 

[shredder12]$ lspci | grep

For more detailed information use this command.

[shredder12]$ sudo lshw -C video

Using Ubuntu Hardware drivers installer utility

This is the Ubuntu recommended way of installing Graphic card drivers. The built in Ubuntu hardware drivers manager is available at System->Administration->Hardware Drivers. The graphics drivers that are installed by this utility are Ubuntu provided binary packages. They are the slightly modified to suit your system although Ubuntu won't take any responsibility(since its a restricted driver).

Click it, you will be asked for password, enter it and you will see a windows similar to this.

Select the driver you are interested in installing and click activate. As the windows says, the one recommended will be a good option. It will now open a small window which will show the download progress bar. It will then download the driver automatically and install it. Please note that since the recommended one is already installed in my system it is shown in green. You should deactivate it first before installing another driver.

Many a times it just freezes either in the middle of downloading or before. It won't be a good idea to kill the process or logout or reboot when it freezes after some downloading. But if such a thing happens after switching on your system again open a terminal Application->Accessories->terminal and type

[shredder12]$ sudo dpkg –configure -a

This will fix the issue if the package was downloaded but not installed and will install the graphic card drivers. If this doesn't happen then try the installation procedure again or you may even try method two.

Using envy-ng to install graphic card drivers

 

Here is a howto to install graphic card drivers using EnvyNG in Ubuntu. Even though I haven't heard any complains against this method of installation but Ubuntu doesn't recommend this. .

Manually downloading the driver from the native card website and installing it

This is the third method ( in priority too). This method is used in the following scenarios.

• When the above 2 methods fail.
• When there is not driver package(provided by Ubuntu) available for your graphic card.
• For fun ;).