John Mercier

I recently wiped my dell xps m1210 and reinstalled ubuntu. It has been over a year since I have had to worry about the nvidia support on linux I wanted to make a post about it so I can remember everything I have to do to get this thing working right.

For those of you new to this, linux does not like proprietary software. I'm not sure how this makes linux better than windows but it really makes it hard for new users to get the best out of their system. Some of the major issues that come with linux are easily fixed in windows. Those issues are dvd support, multimedia files (such as mp3, mp4, and avi), sound drivers, video drivers. Today I'm going to work on video drivers.

Ubuntu makes installing video drivers pretty easy. All I had to do to install it was click system->administration->Hardware Drivers. The program will look for a nvidia driver to activate and make it work. Now, this is much better than when I first started using linux. I used to have to download the source for the drivers, compile them, and install them.

There are many problems I have with the nvidia driver. For one thing I use a laptop. I need to be able to quickly hook up a second monitor and use it with my laptop closed. On ubuntu this is not a fast process at all. I need to switch to that monitor using Fn+F8 twice. Then, when I close the laptop it goes into sleep mode. So, I have to make sure that is turned off in power management. Now that I am on my other monitor I have to adjust the screen resolution. My laptop has a 1280X800 resolution and my monitor is a 1920X1200. I'm not going into any more details on how difficult it is to get everything properly setup. It takes way to long and it is one of those things that keeps users away from linux.

I remember the first time I heard of google chrome I had just completed changing my OS from Windows XP to fedora linux. The change was complete and I had not yet tried running windows on a VM. I didn't try to install chrome until I switched from fedora to Ubuntu, when I found out that chrome does not hava a linux installer. It sucked that I could not use if at all but I decoded to try it on a windows vm. Well, now my browser experience is about to completely change because google has finally came out with a linux installer.

Google chrome beta is not in the ubuntu repository, and although I hate manually installing software I had to try this out. The browser is easy enough to install. Just go the the site, download the package, and use any package manager to install it. It's so nice that linux can easily install software. This is one of the reasons I decided to switch. I remember having to always compile software to get it working, and linux books always start out with compiling software from source to install it. For a new user this can be annoying. I don't think linux better at installing software than windows, its just that linux has improved so much that I love the way it works now.

There are a few issues that I have with chrome so far. First, it doesn't use the ubuntu theme at all. If there is a way to make it look like all the other windows I haven't found it yet. Second, the dialog boxes do not fit into my netbook's  small screen. This is a big deal to me since I use my netbook more than any other computer I have. Google should incorporate scroll bars into all dialog boxes so users can view content that may go off screen. Netbeans does this and it works great on my netbook.

One thing that I like about Chrome, besides its speed and awesome layout, is the extensions. The only extention I use is xmarks so this makes chrome more usable for me. So, the only thing that chrome needs to do is fix the dialog boxes and I will be sold on it. Google, thanks for this wonderful product. The wait was worth it.