Help with nvidia drivers in Ubuntu 8.07 LTS

[Oskuro]

So I finally decided to switch my old box to Ubuntu, and after needing to reprogram the BIOS so that it could boot up correctly (wich required digging through my stuff to find a viable floppy, yes, it is an old box), I now have a problem with my video card.

The card is a Geforce2 MX400, and it is thus not supported by the latest nvidia drivers, but it is supported by the legacy drivers. The problem is that, after I use the repository to get the legacy drivers (and uninstall the new ones) I go to hardware control to activate them (as they are restricted drivers) and it automatically deletes the legacy drivers and reinstalls the latest ones.

So the question is, how can I make the Hardware Control understand that I need the legacy drivers, or how can I manually activate them? My google-fu has yielded this page with the following solution:

Install Nvidia legacy GeForce 2 MX 400 in Ubuntu 8.10

Downloaded the 96.43.09 legacy BETA driver from nvidia

Downloaded from synaptic manager linux-headers-generic and linux-source-2.6.27

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic linux-source-2.6.27

Press CTRL + ALT F1

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

sudo sh <DOWNLOADED NVIDIA DRIVER>

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

But I'm not sure if it is adequate, since it is for 8.10, and I'd prefer to use the standard legacy drivers if possible.

So, suggestions? Or should I just go ahead and do the mentioned procedure?

[darkjedi521]

That's pretty much the standard procedure for anyone who doesn't have prepackaged drivers. Given the age of the card, I wouldn't be worried about them being tagged beta. If you want, you can grab the "release" version. The only updates NVIDIA gives the legacy drivers is a recompile for when the X versions get bumped. You'll also want to make sure GCC is present. It works fine for me on stock Red Hat/Centos/Fedora based systems. Biggest gotcha is you'll have to re-run this procedure EVERY time you have a kernel update from Ubuntu instead of having apt automagically deal with this for you. Just be glad its not an ATI card requiring drivers - ATI drops support for their cards after 3 years and if one wants their 3D drivers, one is stuck with what ever distros were current at the time support was dropped.

[Oskuro]

So after running the procedure (wich includes an nvidia automatic compile of kernel extensions), the X windows system doesn't detect the card properly, thus I get 640x480 resolutions at best, the fonts on the graphical logging screen keep getting smaller with each login, the keyboard when typing log and password defaults back to english, thus forcing me to look up a pic of an english keyboad to type properly (this just affects the login screen, it works fine on the terminal as well as once inside the windows system).

Before the system would randomly allow me different maximun resolutions, now it is worse. I see a reinstall in my inmediate future (not too drastic since I just installed it).

Oh well.

[darkjedi521]

Did you let the installer run nvidia-xconfig? If you did, try running nvidia-xsettings from within X and fixing things there. Good luck, X configuration sucks.