Linux Nvidia Display Driver Install...

[xtknight]

I have no clue how to do the raid stuff. I've just avoided it since I have little use for it.

For sudo you just do

sudo command

so mkdir /tmp would be

sudo mkdir /tmp

sudo just gives you root temporarily but don't use it unless the command you're using requires it.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
I'm still going to convert but I have a few more questions:

Which Antivirus? Symantec Corporate Edition doesn't appear to have a Linux version.

Probably none.

Which Anti-Spyware? Windows Defender obviously doesn't have a Linux version.

Probably none.

Firewall? I guess the Nvidia Personal firewall isn't supported.

iptables is already in yer kernel. You can learn to configure it manually or find a gui package to simplify things. I'm guessing ubuntu has something either included or there's a reccomended package that shouldn't be too hard to find.

I copied my profile from Thunderbird so I retain all of my messages. Can someone tell me where i put that once I get Ubuntu installed.

Should be somewhere within home/you/.mozilla but definitely within a . directory in your home dir. Shouldn't take more than a minute or two of poking around to find. Within that, it should look more or less like the windows profile set up so you can figure out exactly where to put it.

Is there anything else I should know about Linux that I may not have yet realized.

Familiar with the concept of a package manager?

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle
There are many simpler and more important things to learn than how to configure Linux on a RAID array, especially if it's not on a dedicated, true hardware card. Keep it simple and install on separate drives for now.

Well i was doing it through Linux software RAID, but then i found the guide that told me exactly how to do all of this, but apparently something went wrong

-Kevin

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Well RAID only because i have 2x 160Gig HDD's and i dont like dealing with an enormous amount of partitions. I like one big fat partition (aside from the root and the swap partition for linux)

Do you seriously think setting up raid is going to be simpler than just having two partitions? As it is, you seem to have two partitions anyway, with a small / and large raided partition. You can just have one large partition on each drive.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
I'm still going to convert but I have a few more questions:

Which Antivirus? Symantec Corporate Edition doesn't appear to have a Linux version.

None needed.

Which Anti-Spyware? Windows Defender obviously doesn't have a Linux version.

None needed.

Anyway to sync my iPod seeing as Itunes is not supported?

I don't know but Songbird is like iTunes.

Firewall? I guess the Nvidia Personal firewall isn't supported.

None needed provided you have a NAT router.

I have an ATI HDTV Wonder. After research it apparently is supported through Linux Drivers, but not by ATI. Will this still work? Will I be able to watch TB over my Cable or should I list the card and get ready to sell it? (I also have the Remote Wonder so it would be nice if that were supported too )

Open source drivers can be just as good and it should work if there are open source programs to support it.

Can WINE be used to emulate most applications or just games? I want to use my ConvertXtoDVD software but it isn't supported by Linux. If not I can transfer it over to my Tablet and just have it save a .iso.

WINE emulates win32 applications as best it can. Some apps work, some games work.

Why don't you get VMware server, create a virtual machine and install XP on it? It'll save you from a lot of hassle with WINE. VMware is like running Windows within Linux, but it's not fast enough for 3D games.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Well RAID only because i have 2x 160Gig HDD's and i dont like dealing with an enormous amount of partitions. I like one big fat partition (aside from the root and the swap partition for linux)

Do you seriously think setting up raid is going to be simpler than just having two partitions? As it is, you seem to have two partitions anyway, with a small / and large raided partition. You can just have one large partition on each drive.

I dont have 2 partitions. It sees all 298.10GB on dev/mapper/nvidia_agbbbdcf. Within that drive i partitioned it as follows:

1x 10 Gig Partition - ext3 - Will be for /
1x 1 Gig Partition - Linux-Swap - For Linux Swap
1x 287.10 Gig Partition - Extended

1. 1x 287.10 Gig Partition - ext3 - For all the programs and stuff I guess

If there is an alternative to RAID where i can still keep that massive 287.1 Gig Partition then I'm all for it!

-Kevin

 

[Gamingphreek]

Hey its acutally doingn something now

What directory do I have to be in to mount each of the filesystems?

-Kevin

 

[Gamingphreek]

OK here is the guide i am follow. I actually got things working but im going to start over because I dont think i mounted the right drive to the right directory. I can get to the part where i partition the drive and then i understand how to format the drive. But if someone could guide me step by step through the mounting process I think i can manage it.

http://www.ubuntu-in.org/wiki/SATA_RAID_Howto

-Kevin

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Well RAID only because i have 2x 160Gig HDD's and i dont like dealing with an enormous amount of partitions. I like one big fat partition (aside from the root and the swap partition for linux)

Do you seriously think setting up raid is going to be simpler than just having two partitions? As it is, you seem to have two partitions anyway, with a small / and large raided partition. You can just have one large partition on each drive.

I dont have 2 partitions. It sees all 298.10GB on dev/mapper/nvidia_agbbbdcf. Within that drive i partitioned it as follows:

1x 10 Gig Partition - ext3 - Will be for /
1x 1 Gig Partition - Linux-Swap - For Linux Swap
1x 287.10 Gig Partition - Extended

1. 1x 287.10 Gig Partition - ext3 - For all the programs and stuff I guess

If there is an alternative to RAID where i can still keep that massive 287.1 Gig Partition then I'm all for it!

-Kevin

I'm confused. You say you don't want multiple partitions so you go to all that work to make two disks into one logical disk, then you go and split into two partitions again.

Why don't you just put a 1gig swap partition on the first drive, a 150gig / partition on the first drive and a 160gig partition on the second drive and mount it at /disk2 or /home/you/disk2? You'd have the limitation of only being able to put 160gigs in that folder, but at least you'd never have to worry about misconfiguring the raid and destroying everything and you could remove one drive without doing the same.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Well I got rid of the RAID. I just have one disk that I'm just not using. I simply don't have the command line interface or Linux knowledge to configure a RAID array yet. If someone has some way that I can jam the second drive onto the other drive that would be great, if not Ill just have to deal with having a spare drive.

-Kevin

 

[xtknight]

You could mount the second drive in a directory under the first. I don't think you can mount both of them to the same spot (i.e. merge them) without RAID. Why don't you just make the second drive your downloads drive or something?

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: xtknight
You could mount the second drive in a directory under the first. I don't think you can mount both of them to the same spot (i.e. merge them) without RAID. Why don't you just make the second drive your downloads drive or something?

I guess I can do that. Now I cant install the Nvidia Display Driver. If it isn't one thing its another. I disabled the X Server, I installed some thing from the Software package, and now it cant find something else.

Someone please help me or point to a place that will guide me through this!

-Kevin

 

[Brazen]

Maybe this will help you with your nVidia driver problem.

As for the raid deal, maybe it's because it's late at night, maybe I'm just too lazy to re-read your posts and that guide you followed to get what's going on... First of all, if you want to aggregate the drives, you can use LVM. The Ubuntu "Alternate" install disc has piss-poor support for LVM, I know from experience. I don't know about the LiveCD install support for LVM. LVM will let you combine both your drives to look like one big drive, but the data will be concatenated instead of striped (so no speed boost like RAID 0, but you won't lose everything if one drive goes bad, only some things). You can do a ton of cool thing with LVM, but I won't muddle things by getting into that.

As for setting up RAID with Ubuntu, I can fire up a virtual machine tomorrow if I have time and give you more specifics on how Ubuntu does it, but here are the general steps to a RAID1 array:

1. Forget about NVRaid. Disable it. Kill it. Forget about it.
2. Partition the entire first drive as a RAID partition
3. Partition the entire second drive as a RAID partition
4. Create a RAID device, assign those two partitions to it and set it's type as RAID1.

This RAID device now acts just like a blank physical harddrive. You have to set up partitions on the RAID device just like you would a single physical drive. This is typically 102MB for /boot and the remaining space for / formatted as ext3.

btw, just to be sure, you are using the Ubuntu LiveCD to install, right (also called the Ubuntu "desktop" install disc)? And not the "alternate" install disc?

update: even though the OP lost interest, I tried with the LiveCD for the life of me I could not get Ubuntu to install on a software raid device.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Now I cant install the Nvidia Display Driver.

How are you trying to install it? The driver is already in the repositories, so you should be able to do a...

sudo aptitude install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-$ARCH

...where $ARCH is your machine architecture, probably "i686" or "amd64" (you can check by doing uname -a). Those are Debian package names, but I think Ubuntu uses the same ones.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Now I cant install the Nvidia Display Driver.

How are you trying to install it? The driver is already in the repositories, so you should be able to do a...

sudo aptitude install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-$ARCH

...where $ARCH is your machine architecture, probably "i686" or "amd64" (you can check by doing uname -a). Those are Debian package names, but I think Ubuntu uses the same ones.

Yeah it just says that it cant resolve dependencies.

Brazen, I gave up on the RAID. It just isn't working out in Linux for me. I just dont know enough.

I just cant figure everything out. Ill try to work off of my Laptop while but I dont know how long I can do that. If worse comes to worse I can attempt to format my HDD with the LiveCD and then install XP again.

-Kevin

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Yeah it just says that it cant resolve dependencies.

OK, so which dependencies did it say it couldn't resolve? Unlike Windows, Linux error messages are actually useful. If you copy/paste them here, we can probably help you. Just saying "it doesn't work" doesn't get you anywhere.

I just cant figure everything out. Ill try to work off of my Laptop while but I dont know how long I can do that. If worse comes to worse I can attempt to format my HDD with the LiveCD and then install XP again.

I can assure you that no one here has gotten Linux working to their liking on the first try within 36 hours. If that's too long for you to wait, then Linux is not the OS for you.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Im sorry, i was just a little frustrated earlier (It doesn't help right now that my room mate is completely annoying and obnoxious...he is still that way actually. It is 230AM and he has like half a pack of gum in his mouth and is chewing with his mouth open...its ridiculously loud!!!!!)

Ill definitely get some screenshots tomorrow of what is wrong...I actually think I messed something up when trying to follow some guide on how to install the drivers.

As for the other part, I guess Ill just have to learn. I know I shouldn't rush things, I'm just impatient. I have just never had this problem with computers before. When I have a problem I always know, or find out a way to fix it. With an entirely new OS, I just feel so lost because im not used to this. Ill keep reading on Linux. One of my friends is a Senior studying CS who has VMWARE running and does all sorts of stuff with the software. He gets back tonight and is busy tomorrow but said he would stop by late tomorrow or the next day...so that is comforting.

Thank you so much for all the help guys ill definitely post the error messages tomorrow (Im typing this from my Tablet PC the other one is shut down (rare that i do that))

-Kevin

 

[Gamingphreek]

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "nvidia-kernel-amd64"
The following packages are BROKEN:
linux-restricted-modules-2.6.15-25-amd64-generic
The following packages have been kept back:
libtag1c2a libtheora0 readahead
The following NEW packages will be installed:
nvidia-glx
0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 6861kB/14.2MB of archives. After unpacking 47.2MB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
linux-restricted-modules-2.6.15-25-amd64-generic: Depends: nvidia-kernel-common which is a virtual package.
Resolving dependencies...
Unable to resolve dependencies! Giving up...
Abort.


That is what I got. And It may be because i messed up when trying to follow this guide (It was like 4 pages for the drivers and nothing else worked so I gave up lol...)

-Kevin

 

[yuchai]

It sounds like you have Ubuntu up and running. This may be of help to set up numerous things in case you don't know about it yet:

http://ubuntuguide.org

Enjoy!

 

[Gamingphreek]

That is awesome...I will read it thoroughly!

-Kevin

 

[Gamingphreek]

Well I read it and did a couple things. I installed the KDE desktop environment and I LOVE IT. I don't quite know what but It just looks better lol.

But my Nvidia drivers still aren't installed. I went into the Synaptic Program Manager and fixed all dependencies so it went all through the process, and then enabled the driver, but nothing happened.

Is it much harder for me to download the drivers from Nvidia's site and then install them? Ill try that, and hopefully it will work

-Kevin

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Well I read it and did a couple things. I installed the KDE desktop environment and I LOVE IT. I don't quite know what but It just looks better lol.

But my Nvidia drivers still aren't installed. I went into the Synaptic Program Manager and fixed all dependencies so it went all through the process, and then enabled the driver, but nothing happened.

Is it much harder for me to download the drivers from Nvidia's site and then install them? Ill try that, and hopefully it will work

-Kevin

Ya the official Nvidia binary drivers will work. You just need to make sure that any nvidia driver related packages are not installed, otherwise you may end up with a conflict which would be difficult to figure out.


Also, I suppose they fixed it with the latest nvidia relaese, but with Debian I had trouble with nvidia drivers the last time I installed them since they didn't work well with modular X.org and didn't install the software in the correct directories. But like I said they probably have it fixed by now.

The upside to using the drivers directly from Nvidia's website is that you get the newest stuff. The downside is that whenever you do a upgrade that upgrades the kernel or X.org stuff you'll probably have to reinstall the drivers which is annoying but not difficult.

Generally it goes like this for Ubuntu (after making sure that Ubuntu's nvidia packages are completely uninstalled)
* download the NVIDIA* file from their website to your /home/username directory.
* Close out all your apps and log out of graphical mode.
* Swtich to a virtual console by going ctrl-alt-F# were F# is F1 through F6 buttons.
* log into there as your user.
* ->$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
to turn off X
* ->$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
to make sure that everything is up to date.
If there was a kernel update then reboot and start over
* if you have 'universe' repositories enabled then go:
sudo apt-get install module-assistant
This is a program to assist you in installing third party kernel modules. Makes it easier. Otherwise you have to manually install the kernel headers package for your kernel and build-essentials
* sudo m-a update
* sudo m-a prepare
* sudo bash NVIDIA-whatever.pkg
to build and install the drivers. You can let the Nvidia installer modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf for you or you can do it yourself.

If everything goes right then you can go:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

The nvidia logo should pop up and everything should work.

 

[Nothinman]

Ya the official Nvidia binary drivers will work.

They should work but it's a bad idea since the install/uninstall scripts mess with files in /usr and will confuse the package manager.

Also, I suppose they fixed it with the latest nvidia relaese, but with Debian I had trouble with nvidia drivers the last time I installed them since they didn't work well with modular X.org and didn't install the software in the correct directories. But like I said they probably have it fixed by now.

They've been fine in sid for a while now, the only real problem is that in sid the kernel versions are still changing and it takes a bit for the nvidia-kernel-* packages to be rebuilt after an update.

 

[Gamingphreek]

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-common
sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

* Should the above not enable the new driver, you can enable it manually by opening the X config file:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf


* and replacing "nv" with "nvidia"

* Read #How to restart GNOME without rebooting computer

* Enable XvMC by creating the nVidia XvMC configuration file

sudo gedit /etc/X11/XvMCConfig

I did the first part of this so it makes sense that I continue with those instructions. It didn't enable the driver so I have to edit the X config file. However, when I go into the X.conf file to edit it, there is nothing there.

Did I do something fundamentally wrong?

-Kevin

 

[xtknight]

To enable the NVIDIA driver you just need to replace 'nv' with 'nvidia' in Xorg.conf. I'm unfamiliar with XvMCConfig or what it does, but you don't need it for general 3D acceleration.

I'd just edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, save it, then reboot. That's the easiest thing to do. Or you can restart gdm from a virtual terminal:

<Ctrl+Alt+F2>
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart