Thursday, May 24, 2007

Nvidia and ATI the Easy Way



Yesterday I reinstalled Ubuntu on my Dell laptop, but made the silly mistake of not backing up my xorg.conf. It seems that the directions that I originally followed to get my Geforce4 4200 configured are no longer available where I first found them, so I spent several hours trying to figure out the correct settings for xorg.conf. I was cruising through the Ubuntu Forums when I came upon a post by Alberto Malone in which he recommended his Envy program to another user. I subsequently visited his website, grabbed a copy, and ran it. It immediately found and installed the correct drivers and configured my xorg.conf. This is no mean feat. My Geforce4 is quickly falling into obscurity and requires specific tweaks to the xorg.conf. The Envy utility is made to download, install, and configure the drivers for any ATI or Nvidia card. I was very impressed, and recommend the program to anyone having difficulty setting up their graphics card. Well done Alberto!

To install Envy, do the following:


wget http://albertomilone.com/ubuntu/nvidia/scripts/envy_0.9.5-0ubuntu1_all.deb
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-dev build-essential
sudo dpkg -i envy_0.9.5-0ubuntu1_all.deb


You should now find Envy in the 'Applications->System Tools' menu. All credit for Envy belongs to Alberto Malone. His Envy page can be found here.

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