Everything seems ok with Xubuntu, so one of the first things I do with a new installation is to get my video card working to its ability. This means installing NVIDIA drivers.
The installation, these days, is completely trivial especially if your card is well supported and all you are interested in is the drivers in the Ubuntu repository. This is all I need.
First thing is to install the restricted modules for the kernel. The easiest way is to install the complete linux package, that includes the kernel and restricted modules. Easiest because updating both components in the future can be done with one line. I prefer to use aptitude (from the command line, not the ncurses interface) to apt-get or Synaptic as my choice for installing programs, as it intelligently manages dependencies, even when un-installing. Much more tidy.
I have an AMD X2 3800, a K8 processor, but since I’m on 32bit Xubuntu, the K7-SMP is the most appropriate kernel for me. These days, all K7 (and other kernels where the situation is possible) kernels are SMP enabled. So getting the linux-k7-smp package is the same as the linux-k7 package.
The other package I need is the nvidia-glx package to enable 3D acceleration for my card. (The nvidia-glx package also gets the restricted-modules too … I do things my way!)
sudo aptitude install linux-k7-smp nvidia-glx
sudo nvidia-xconfig
Once that’s all finished, I should be able to run the NVIDIA settings utility using,
nvidia-settings
But I want a menu entry. This wasn’t as easy as I first thought. I want the settings to appear in the ‘System’ part of the menu structure. Unfortunately the XFCE menu editor doesn’t allow this, so I had to do some cheating.
First thing is to copy a .desktop file that appears in the ‘System’ menu; I chose Synaptic.
cd /usr/share/applications/
sudo cp synaptic.desktop nvidia-settings.desktop
sudo mousepad nvidia-settings.desktop
Next is to edit out the .desktop file so that it contains the right elements. Mine ended up looking something like this.
[Desktop Entry]
Name=NVIDIA Settings
GenericName=NVIDIA Settings
Comment=Change Settings for NVIDIA Card
Exec=nvidia-settings
Icon=nvidia-settings.png
Terminal=false
MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Categories=PackageManager;GTK;System;Settings
NotShowIn=KDE
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=true
Then it’s a simple save and wait. For some reason the change takes a while to come through, but when it does …
I still can’t get the menu to display the icon I want for the NVIDIA settings, but I’ll work on that.
The next step is to enable the compositor in XFWM, the XFCE window manager, for some transparency goodness.
fffffx