IMPORTANT NOTE

These are instructions for Ubuntu 10.10 and these worked in Ubuntu 12.10 (which I have now). It may break in the future though.

I generally install my Ubuntu systems using the Server version of Ubuntu because it tends to works a lot better. The result is that I don't get all the Desktop features installed by the installer. That prevents me from installing the NVidia driver automatically.

The newest drives for X.org make use of some source for the client-side driver and that requires you to install the linux source code and headers. I'm wondering if each time we upgrade we have to recompile something... TBD...

Anyway, today I ran the following and it worked at once on reboot I could see all the 396 XGLXConfig or something like that... (why do we need that many?!)

apt-get install linux-source
apt-get install linux-headers-generic
apt-get install nvidia-current-updates

Before the reboot, when I typed the following:

glxinfo | less

It would tell me that the vendor was Mesa.

After the reboot, it tells me it's NVidia:

server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
client glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
client glx version string: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: Quadro 600/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 4.2.0 NVIDIA 304.51
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.20 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

Perfect. 8-)

Now my next step will be to install CUDA for Linux so I can play with the 96 cores available on that tiny video board.