[SOLVED] NVIDIA proprietary driver

[twodogs]

While digging around in the Kubuntu desktop, I looked at  "System/Hardware Drivers" and noticed that the NVIDIA proprietary driver was not in use. I have often read that this driver was better, enabling more desirable features than the standard Linux driver. There was a tempting "activate" button that I almost hit, but decided to check the forum and wiki beforehand. I didn't see much on the forums, but I found a section on display drivers in the tutorials.

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers

This outlines a more complicated way of manually loading the driver. Should I use this procedure from the tutorial or is it outdated? Should I press the activate button on the Kubuntu desktop or will that break the system? Should I be messing with the proprietary driver at all?

As my signature shows, I have an ASUS P5N7A-VM with onboard GeForce 9300 chipset. Thanks in advance.

John

[tschak909]

When the system first installs the LinuxMCE parts, if it detects an NVIDIA card, it will attempt to install the NVIDIA binary drivers automatically.

-Thom

[twodogs]

Thanks for the reply, Thom. Does that mean that MCE is using the proprietary driver, even though the Kubuntu hardware driver menu shows that it is not installed?

[tschak909]

well, if you ran through the AVWizard, it should have installed the driver. You can see by looking at the contents of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf ... to see if the "nvidia" driver is used, instead of "nv"

-Thom

[twodogs]

Great. I did run the wizard and xorg.conf shows "nvidia" as it should.

John

[DragonK]

cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version shows you the version of the driver used.